Executive Compensation and Earnings Management Under Moral Hazard

Executive Compensation and Earnings Management Under Moral Hazard
Author: Bo Sun
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 33
Release: 2010-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1437930980

Analyzes executive compensation in a setting where managers may take a costly action to manipulate corporate performance, and whether managers do so is stochastic. Examines how the opportunity to manipulate affects the optimal pay contract, and establishes necessary and sufficient conditions under which earnings management occurs. The author¿s model provides a set of implications on the role earnings management plays in driving the time-series and cross-sectional variation of executive compensation. In addition, the model's predictions regarding the changes of earnings management and executive pay in response to corporate governance legislation are consistent with empirical observations. Charts and tables.

Executive Compensation and Earnings Management Under Moral Hazard

Executive Compensation and Earnings Management Under Moral Hazard
Author: Bo Sun
Publisher:
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2009
Genre: Corporate governance
ISBN:

This paper analyzes executive compensation in a setting where managers may take a costly action to manipulate corporate performance, and whether managers do so is stochastic. We examine how the opportunity to manipulate affects the optimal pay contract, and establish necessary and sufficient conditions under which earnings management occurs. Our model provides a set of implications on the role earnings management plays in driving the time-series and cross-sectional variation of executive compensation. In addition, the model's predictions regarding the changes of earnings management and executive pay in response to corporate governance legislation are consistent with empirical observations.

The Endogeneity of Executive Compensation and Its Impact on Management Discretionary Behavior Over Financial Reporting

The Endogeneity of Executive Compensation and Its Impact on Management Discretionary Behavior Over Financial Reporting
Author: Lan Sun
Publisher:
Total Pages: 35
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

Extant literature has emerged testing the relationship between executive compensation and earnings management and many these studies have documented that compensation contracts create strong incentives for management discretionary behavior over financial reporting. Previous studies also pointed out that executive compensation could be simultaneously co-determined with earnings management, suggesting a potential endogeneity problem may exist between discretionary accruals and compensation structure. Using a sample of all Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed companies comprising 3,326 firm-year observations encompassing the periods from 2000 to 2006, this study examines the endogeneity of executive total compensation and its various components. Applying a 2SLS model the results show a significantly negative association between expected fixed compensation (particularly expected salary) and upwards earnings management and a significantly positive association between expected at-risk compensation (particularly expected bonuses) and upwards earnings management. These findings suggest endogeneity exists in that fixed compensation and salaries provide disincentives for managers to practice aggressive earnings management whereas at-risk compensation and bonuses induce managers to employ income-increasing discretionary accruals to inflate reported earnings. This study found that executive compensation plays a role in determining earnings management activities. Executives may distort financial reporting to maximize their personal wealth if their incentives are not fully aligned with those of shareholders. Compensation committees, therefore, may gain some insight in designing compensation structures that balance the incentive to improve a firm's performance with the incentive to earnings manipulation.

Executive Compensation and Financial Accounting

Executive Compensation and Financial Accounting
Author: David Aboody
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2010
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1601983425

Executive Compensation and Financial Accounting provides research perspectives on the interface between financial reporting and disclosure policies and executive compensation. In particular, it focuses on two important dimensions: - the effects of compensation-based incentives on executives' financial accounting and disclosure choices, and - the role of financial reporting and income tax regulations in shaping executive compensation practices. Executive Compensation and Financial Accounting examines the key dimensions of the relation between financial accounting and executive compensation. Specifically, the authors examine the extent to which compensation plans create incentives for executives to make particular financial reporting and disclosure choices. They also examine the extent to which accounting regulation creates incentives for firms to design particular compensation plans for their executives.

Earnings Management and Executive Compensation

Earnings Management and Executive Compensation
Author: Ronald E. Shrieves
Publisher:
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2002
Genre:
ISBN:

We present and test hypotheses about how the components of compensation influence earnings management behavior. Hypotheses are based, in part, on the observation that discretion over accounting accruals gives managers a potentially valuable timing option that will lead to strategies for maximizing their compensation. Our empirical analysis shows that earnings management intensity, as measured by the absolute value of discretionary current accruals scaled by asset size, is related to managerial compensation contract design. We find the amounts of stock options and bonuses, and the incentive intensity of stock options, are positively related to earnings management intensity, whereas salaries are negatively related. Results do not reliably support either positive or negative effects of long-term incentive plans or restricted stock compensation on earnings management intensity, aside from the incentive intensity effect of restricted stock. We show that magnitudes of the effects of some compensation variables on earnings management intensity are conditional on proximity of premanaged earnings to specified targets. The importance of our findings is the strong evidence they provide that compensation contract design does influence earnings management, and that the influences of the various compensation components appear to be largely predictable on a presumption that (at least some) managers behave opportunistically.

Too Much Is Not Enough

Too Much Is Not Enough
Author: Robert W. Kolb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199977127

The scholarly literature on executive compensation is vast. As such, this literature provides an unparalleled resource for studying the interaction between the setting of incentives (or the attempted setting of incentives) and the behavior that is actually adduced. From this literature, there are several reasons for believing that one can set incentives in executive compensation with a high rate of success in guiding CEO behavior, and one might expect CEO compensation to be a textbook example of the successful use of incentives. Also, as executive compensation has been studied intensively in the academic literature, we might also expect the success of incentive compensation to be well-documented. Historically, however, this has been very far from the case. In Too Much Is Not Enough, Robert W. Kolb studies the performance of incentives in executive compensation across many dimensions of CEO performance. The book begins with an overview of incentives and unintended consequences. Then it focuses on the theory of incentives as applied to compensation generally, and as applied to executive compensation particularly. Subsequent chapters explore different facets of executive compensation and assess the evidence on how well incentive compensation performs in each arena. The book concludes with a final chapter that provides an overall assessment of the value of incentives in guiding executive behavior. In it, Kolb argues that incentive compensation for executives is so problematic and so prone to error that the social value of giving huge incentive compensation packages is likely to be negative on balance. In focusing on incentives, the book provides a much sought-after resource, for while there are a number of books on executive compensation, none focuses specifically on incentives. Given the recent fervor over executive compensation, this unique but logical perspective will garner much interest. And while the literature being considered and evaluated is technical, the book is written in a non-mathematical way accessible to any college-educated reader.

Introduction to Earnings Management

Introduction to Earnings Management
Author: Malek El Diri
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2017-08-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319626868

This book provides researchers and scholars with a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of earnings management theory and literature. While it raises new questions for future research, the book can be also helpful to other parties who rely on financial reporting in making decisions like regulators, policy makers, shareholders, investors, and gatekeepers e.g., auditors and analysts. The book summarizes the existing literature and provides insight into new areas of research such as the differences between earnings management, fraud, earnings quality, impression management, and expectation management; the trade-off between earnings management activities; the special measures of earnings management; and the classification of earnings management motives based on a comprehensive theoretical framework.

Earnings Smoothing, Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance

Earnings Smoothing, Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance
Author: David L. Eckles
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Unlike studies that estimate managerial bias, we utilize a direct measure of managerial bias in the U.S. insurance industry to investigate the effects of executive compensation and corporate governance on firms' earnings management behaviors. We find managers receiving larger bonuses and stock awards tend to make reserving decisions that serve to decrease firm earnings. Moreover, we examine the monitoring effect of corporate board structures in mitigating managers' reserve manipulation practices. We find managers are more likely to manipulate reserves in the presence of particular board structures. Similar results are not found when we employ traditional estimated measures of managerial bias.

Earnings Management

Earnings Management
Author: Joshua Ronen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2008-08-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0387257713

This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

Pay without Performance

Pay without Performance
Author: Lucian Bebchuk
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2006-09-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 067426195X

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.