We model career concerns in a regime where a linear incentive contract includes a mix of a publicly observed performance measure and a second, correlated, private measure that is not observed by the labor market. Under this quot;mixquot; regime, we find that agent effort and total agency payoff...

This study reports the results of three experiments that examine how preferences for wealth and honesty affect managerial reporting. We find that subjects often sacrifice wealth to make honest or partially honest reports, and they generally do not lie more as the payoff to lying increases. We...

This paper examines the extent to which accounting systems separately identify all the costs of environmental regulation. We estimate the relation between the quot;visiblequot; cost of regulatory compliance (costs that firms' accounting systems correctly classify as quot;environmentalquot;), and...

In this paper, we seek to provide empirical documentation of the effect of Activity-Based Costing (ABC) information on product and customer-related decisions made by managers in a company. Proponents of ABC argue that when an entity implements ABC, it reaps at least two important benefits:...

Opportunity cost is a central concept in decision making. It is difficult to measure because it is the value associated with opportunities foregone. In this paper, we characterize three time-based dimensions of resources to help understand and estimate opportunity costs. These dimensions capture...

Using archival and published sources, the author studies the evolution of thinking, teaching and writing at the Harvard Business School from 1908 to 1980 in the areas of cost/management accounting, financial accounting, and management control, including information systems, and how the Business...

We derive equations that allow managers and analysts to quickly forecast percentage change in profit and perform what if analyses without the need to build spreadsheet models or develop pro-forma income statements. The equations specify the relationship between the changes in costs and profit in...

Recent developments have sparked a renewed interest concerning risk related topics in nonfinancial companies. Risk management issues directly touch the domain of management accounting and control. In Germany, topics related to the support of corporate or enterprise risk management are commonly...

We study the role of peer groups in determining the structure and the total amount of executive compensation. Our analysis is based on a standard agency model in which the agent's reservation utility is related to the peer group used for performance evaluation. Our main result is that the...

In this paper, we study a setting where a firm (principal) is privately informed of the firm's potential and contracts with an agent to supply unobservable effort. We show it can be optimal for the firm to have loose monitoring in the sense that the monitoring system is less perfect than what is...