Voluntary changes in accounting principle represent explicit and fundamental decisions by managers to exercise accounting discretion. This paper develops an organizing framework to review prior literature on voluntary changes, provides descriptive insights on contemporary changes, and identifies...

Theory suggests that debt financing, relative to equity financing, makes managers reluctant to part with assets. Our evidence supports this theoretical prediction, revealing that the reluctance to part with a debt financed asset causes two decision errors—(1) participants forego investments...

In a setting in which corporate headquarters dictates total sales targets, we study how supervisors allocate sales targets to individual stores. Specifically, we analyze whether supervisors strategically use discretion in the target-setting process to address compensation contracting issues. We...