This paper explores "revenue accounting" in contrast to traditional "cost accounting." Revenue accounting is to serve information needs of managers and investors in planning and controlling a firm's sales activities and their financial consequences. Weaknesses of traditional accounting have...

When the Revelation Principle (RP) holds, managing earnings confers no advantage over revelation. We construct an explanation for earnings management that is based on limitations on owners? ability to make commitments (a violation of the RP?s assumptions). Traditionally, earnings management is...

We develop a positive theory of accounting standards when standards generate network externalities and differ in the amount of reporting discretion, or flexibility, they provide firms. We evaluate expected value-maximizing firms' preferences between two standards regimes, rigid and flexible, as...

We study a contracting problem where a principal delegates the decision to implement a “project” to an agent who obtains private information about the value of the project before making the implementation decision. Moral hazard arises because the agent gets private random non-contractible...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper studies the allocational effects associated with the precision of accounting estimates when the precision of estimates is a choice variable for firms. One part of the paper considers the effects of the observability of precision choices. We show that, generally, making...

This paper articulates the arguments for and against introducing competition into the accounting standard-setting process in the U.S. by allowing individual corporations to issue financial reports prepared in accordance with either FASB or IASB rules. The paper examines several arguments...