This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on firm-level investment during the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that firms with less conservative financial reporting experienced a sharper decline in investment activity following...

US CEOs hold a large amount of equity that is not explicitly constrained by ownership guidelines or vesting requirements. Although the average CEO receives a risk premium in his annual pay for holding unconstrained equity, most CEOs hold more equity than is compensated by the risk premium in...

The two major paradigmsin the theoretical agency literature aremoral hazard (i.e., hidden action)and adverseselection (i.e., hiddeninformation). Prior research typically solves these problemsin isolation, as opposed to simultaneouslyincorporating both adverseselection and moral hazard features....

The sensitivity of stock options' payoff to return volatility, or vega, provides risk-averse CEOs with an incentive to increase their firms' risk more by increasing systematic rather than idiosyncratic risk. This effect manifests because any increase in the firm's systematic risk can be hedged...

Recent research finds that firms characterized by high corporate transparency have a greater proportion of independent directors. The direction of the causality of this relation, however, is unclear. One branch of the governance literature takes corporate transparency as fixed and shows that the...

We use a proprietary data set with detailed executive compensation information to examine the relationship between the incentives of the tax director and GAAP and cash effective tax rates, the book-tax gap, and measures of tax aggressiveness. We find that the incentive compensation of the tax...