Changing management accounting systems requires more than appropriate implementation. It is argued that structural characteristics of an organization, centralization in particular, should also be taken into account when deciding on a change. Centralization implies higher costs of communication...

We collect detailed survey data on financial managers' annual bonus plans and extensively validate a measure of the willingness to engage in unethical behavior using a panel of 253 respondents. Our main finding suggests that incentives to meet financial targets are positively associated with...

Some organizations have abandoned traditional annual budgeting and instead use an alternate approach known as Beyond Budgeting (BB). Our study presents the results of an exploratory analysis comparing 80 organizations that have implemented at least some of the BB practices to a group of 121...

Managerial incentive plans often combine objective measures of performance relative to beginning-of-year targets with ex post subjective evaluations. We argue that one of the roles of subjectivity is to offset the limitations of target-based rewards and strengthen managerial incentives when...

A large stream of work on relative performance evaluation highlights the benefits of using information about peer performance in contracting. In contrast, the potential costs of discouraging cooperation among peers have received much less attention. The purpose of our study is to examine how the...

We use survey data to estimate the effect of the 2008–2009 recession on three fundamental bonus plan choices. We find robust evidence that the recession (i) reduced incentive strength, (ii) increased the relative incentive weight on financial performance measures, and (iii) increased the...