Financial services are an increasingly important sector in modern economies, yet many accounting and auditing texts focus on manufacturing and retailing. This teaching note describes the role of financial institutions in transforming long-term, difficult-to-sell assets into short-term bank...

A worker can reduce tax liability by contributing to a private pension plan when marginal tax rates are high and withdraw pension benefits when marginal tax rates are low. We quantify the tax benefit of income smoothing through the private retirement system and find that it is negligible. This...

This teaching note illustrates how reporting historical data, even when it is unverifiable, can be useful in improving productive efficiency. Historical cost accounting is evaluated in a simple multi-person setting with private information. Because the source of contracting frictions is limited...

This paper adopts a valuation perspective within an asymmetric information setting and explores properties of economic income. The optimal intertemporal contract induces an accrual component of income which would not exist absent the information problem. The contracting solution introduces a...

The purpose of this paper is to study capital budgeting in a setting where emphasis is on control over project selection. We construct a model of a multidivisional firm in which there are no constraints on investment and all projects have a positive net present value. Nevertheless, we show that...

In a single period stewardship setting in which an agent has some reporting discretion, we identify the types of reporting discretion that lead to relevant and reliable reporting. We also provide instances when the reporting discretion available to the agent will cause these two characteristics...

This paper presents a principal-agent model in which subsequent to contracting the risk averse agent becomes informed about the production process. Communication of the agent's information is always valuable. The optimal contract given this information asymmetry is characterized by less...

This paper analyzes the role of the agent's bankruptcy constraints in multiperiod principal-agent models with asymmetric information. Conditions are provided under which commitment to a long-term contract involving N rounds of investment improves upon repetition of N identical single-period...