The demand for chief financial officer (CFO) service on corporate boards has grown substantially in recent years, leading to questions about how these outside board appointments might affect a CFO's ability to fulfill her responsibilities at her home firm. Contrary to concerns about CFOs being...

We present evidence that, while individuals with accounting expertise bring key skills to financial reporting responsibilities of the CFO position, they tend to lack educational and career experiences relevant to non-accounting responsibilities (e.g., operations and strategy). Assuming boards'...

We test the association between CFO effort and the quality of public firms' financial information environments. We evaluate this relation using a measure of CFO leisure consumption – specifically, the amount of golf played – as an inverse proxy for effort. We find that CFOs consume more...

I study an important accounting consequence—financial misstatements—of CFO outside board membership. I find that firms with CFOs holding outside directorships have a lower likelihood of misstatements. These results likely reflect the benefits accruing to CFOs' home firms in terms of improved...

Even though financial reporting primarily falls within the scope of the CFO responsibilities, there is considerable evidence for the CEO's influence on corporate misreporting. Regulatory initiatives such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have therefore increased the CEO's responsibility in the...

Using a large sample of U.S. firms, we provide evidence on the interplay between CEO overconfidence and CFO overconfidence on cost behavior in the setting of cost stickiness. We predict that overconfident CEOs or CFOs overestimate future demand, which makes them more likely to keep excess...

Firms trade-off CFOs' fiduciary duties against their decision-making duties when designing CFO bonus plans. Decreasing bonus incentives tied to financial measures benefits CFOs' fiduciary responsibilities at the expense of motivating their decision making duties. As prior research indicates that...

We study whether relative power in the CEO-CFO relationship influences CEO compensation. To operationalize relative power of a CEO over a CFO, we define CFO co-option as the appointment of a CFO after a CEO assumes office. We find that CFO co-option is associated with a CEO pay premium of about...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the resignation of a top executive increases a firm's likelihood of failure. When auditors perceive an increased likelihood of failure, a going concern modified audit opinion is issued. This study tests the relationship between top management resignations and the...

We examine differences in political ideology between audit partners and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and the impact of these differences on financial reporting quality. These individuals cooperate to jointly produce the audited financial statements, and yet there is limited archival...