We investigate how managerial ability affects the intentional distortion of financial statements (earnings management). On the one hand, better managers receive a compensation premium for their perceived ability, and to the extent that earnings management would tarnish their reputations, we expect them to manage earnings less. On the other hand, better managers may be more able to extract rents...

This study provides evidence that managerial incentives, shaped by compensation contracts, help to explain the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment. We develop a model in which the manager, induced by an incentive contract, makes investment decisions for a firm that faces time-varying volatility. In the model, a manager’s privately optimal investment response to a volatilit...

This paper examines endgame behavior, specifically the behavior of managers whose primary concern is to retain their jobs. Managers are taken to be of two types, good and bad, and only one manager is randomly selected as the firm’s first-period manager. The manager unobservably chooses the mean and standard deviation (limited by a mean-standard deviation frontier) of the process that generates ...