Environmental Accounting and Corporate Performance

Accounting Discretion, Corporate Governance and Firm Performance

We investigate whether accounting discretion is (i) abused by opportunistic managers who exploit lax governance structures, or (ii) used by managers in a manner consistent with efficient contracting and shareholder value-maximization. Prior research documents an association between accounting discretion and poor governance quality and concludes that such evidence is consistent with abuse of the...

Corporate governance and environmental performance and disclosures

Accounting for Corporate Behavior

T he year 2002 was one of great tumult for the American corporation. As the year began, news of accounting irregularities at energy giant Enron was unfolding at a rapid pace. These revelations would ultimately lead to the demise of that firm and its auditor Arthur Andersen. But Enron was not an isolated case, as other accounting scandals soon followed at WorldCom and Global Crossing in the tele...

Pay for Performance: Environmental Disasters and Accounting Scandals

We explore the relationship between equity compensation and the failure of risky projects, …nding a non-monotonic relationship. However, for those settings where failures are high-stakes— e.g., environmental disasters and accounting scandals— the relationship is positive. We test these predictions for environmental and accounting failures of large US …rms from 1996 through 2011 and …nd that cha...

Corporate Governance, Accounting Conservatism, and Manipulation

Prior studies have portrayed accounting conservatism as a tool that enables boards to perform their monitoring duties. We develop a model that suggests that the empirical association between conservatism and governance can also run in the opposite direction —only well-governed firms with suffi cient monitoring in place can fully utilize the benefits of conservative accounting. In our setting, c...