Survey evidence reveals that managers prefer to avoid dilution of earnings per share (EPS), though financial theory suggests it is irrelevant in firm valuation. We explore contracting and behavioral explanations for this apparent paradox using a large sample of debt-equity issuers. We first...

Recent research shows that matching between contemporaneous revenues and expenses has declined over the past 40 years. We argue that this decline in matching reduces the contracting usefulness of earnings and affects managerial effort allocation and performance measure choice. Based on a...

Prior research shows that SEC comment letters provide useful information to outsiders of the firm. However, whether insiders such as boards of directors use SEC comment letters for the purpose of internal performance evaluation has not been studied. We find that firms reduce CEO annual bonuses...

In this study, we examine how business strategies affect compensation contracting and performance evaluation. Using textual measures of business strategies derived from corporate 10-K filings, we find that firms adopting the operational excellence strategy place a higher compensation weight on...