Pay for non-performance is among the most prominent arguments of executive rent extraction, especially Bertrand and Mullainathan's (2001) pay for luck. We revisit their finding over the last two decades, 1997 through 2016. Pay for luck presents in the first decade but declines in the second...

We examine employment effects, such as wages and employee turnover, before, during, and after periods of fraudulent financial reporting. To analyze these effects, we combine U.S. Census data with SEC enforcement actions against firms with serious misreporting (“fraud”). We find, compared to...

Financial accounting affords considerable discretion to firms in aggregating internal information for external dissemination, yet little evidence exists about the consequences of such aggregation. We examine a central operational effect by studying whether withholding disaggregated cost...