We examine how the threat of litigation affects an entrepreneur's reporting behavior when the entrepreneur (i) can misrepresent his privately observed information, (ii) pays legal damages out of his own pocket, and (iii) is optimistic about the firm's prospects relative to investors. We find...

This paper examines whether issuing management earnings guidance motivates a firm to raise its level of performance. The failure of management to attain a forecast may reflect poorly on its industry understanding, knowledge of the firm, and management capability. Accordingly, we hypothesize and...

We analyze the effect of committee formation on how corporate boards perform two main functions: setting CEO pay and overseeing the financial reporting process. The use of performance-based pay schemes induces the CEO to manipulate earnings, which leads to an increased need for board oversight....

This paper studies the optimal design of long-term executive pay plans when boards of directors use accounting information for investment decision-making and executives can take costly actions to manipulate this information. The model predicts that a shift to more convex executive pay plans,...