Financial accounting information and corporate governance

Corporate Governance, Accounting Conservatism, and Manipulation

Prior studies have portrayed accounting conservatism as a tool that enables boards to perform their monitoring duties. We develop a model that suggests that the empirical association between conservatism and governance can also run in the opposite direction —only well-governed firms with suffi cient monitoring in place can fully utilize the benefits of conservative accounting. In our setting, c...

Accounting Discretion, Corporate Governance and Firm Performance

We investigate whether accounting discretion is (i) abused by opportunistic managers who exploit lax governance structures, or (ii) used by managers in a manner consistent with efficient contracting and shareholder value-maximization. Prior research documents an association between accounting discretion and poor governance quality and concludes that such evidence is consistent with abuse of the...

Financial accounting and corporate governance:a discussion

Bushman and Smith (2001, this issue) provide a useful review of research on the role of accounting in management compensation contracts and an appealing future research agenda that builds on recent research using a cross-country approach. This paper rounds out their discussion by highlighting some limitations of their research agenda, providing a critical review of the contributions of accounti...

Managerial Preferences , Corporate Governance , and Financial Structure ∗

Conflicts of interest between insiders (e.g, controlling shareholders) and outsiders (e.g., minority shareholders) are central to the analysis of modern corporation. In an integrated continuous-time contingent claims framework with imperfect corporate governance, we examine a controlling shareholder’s optimal choice of capital structure, ownership concentration, private benefit diversion, consu...

Corporate Governance and Information Security