We examine the role of accounting in CEO equity compensation design. For a sample of ExecuComp firms in 1995-2001, we find that financial reporting concerns are positively related to stock option use and total compensation, and negatively related to the use of restricted stock. We confirm our...

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad versus good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings...

Lang, Raedy and Wilson (JAE 2006) compare the properties of U.S. GAAP accounting numbers across cross-listed and U.S. firms. Using a wide range of properties, LRW show that accounting data are not comparable, even though sample firms use the same accounting standards. I discuss how these...

In this paper, we investigate the reputational penalties to managers of firms announcing earnings restatements. More specifically, we examine management turnover and the subsequent employment of displaced managers at firms announcing earnings restatements during 1997 or 1998. In contrast to...

We examine how a firm's decision to capitalize vs expense Ramp;D costs affects how the firm manages earnings with Ramp;D. We find that expensers engage in real earnings management, cutting Ramp;D expenditures to meet earnings benchmarks. Capitalizers, however, cut Ramp;D expense to meet...

We model a two-period pure exchange economy where a risk averse manager, who has private information regarding future earnings, is required to issue an earnings report to investors at the end of each period. While the manager is prohibited from directly disclosing her private information, she is...

We investigate firms' financial reporting policies with respect to business combinations, particularly the choice between the purchase and pooling-of-interests methods. To control for potentially confounding effects related to the method of acquisition financing, we focus on a sample of...

In the last few years the financial accounting model has been attacked on a number of fronts. Some argue that the model reports irrelevant information in today's knowledge-based economy, while others argue that the model's reporting discretion makes the results unreliable. Accruals allow the...

This paper empirically examines incentives facing managers of Australian and U.K. life insurers to voluntarily report actuarial estimates of their financial reports estimates of their future profits on existing business, based actuarial income smoothing techniques (AIS). The propensity of...

This paper examines the controversy surrounding the use of the Inverted-Sum-Of-Years-Digits (ISOYD) method of goodwill amortisation and events leading to its banning by the Australian accounting regulatory bodies. Companies using the method claimed that a prohibition would reduce their share...