This study examines a commercial bank manager's incentives to reduce regulatory costs imposed when the bank's capital adequacy ratio falls below its regulatory minimum. It also tests the general political sensitivity hypothesis that a manager seeks to reduce political costs incurred when revenue is unusually large. Tests of adjustments to the loan loss provision, loan charge-offs, and securities gains and losses attempt to control for exogenous economic conditions and previous investing decisions. Results are consistent with hypotheses associating accounting adjustments with capital adequacy ratio guidelines, but fail to support the political sensitivity hypothesis.

Using a sample of LIFO users, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of adopting a simultaneous equations approach to study managers' adjustments of interacting accounting measures that meet multiple objectives. We focus on the importance of considering differences in the costs and the effectiveness of adjusting accounting measures. In addition, we examine managers' objectives in subsequent years and how adjustments' reversals affect those objectives. Although generally consistent with earlier studies of LIFO inventory adjustments, our results indicate that modelling interacting accounting measures, such as other current accruals and depreciation, leads to differing conclusions about the role of taxes.

Both debt covenants and federal monitoring restrict banks’ discretion. We examine whether banks substituted monitoring for covenants by investigating debt issues of 105 banks between 1979 and 1984, a period when monitoring increased. We hypothesize that bank shareholders take advantage of the intersection between debt covenants and regulatory monitoring to reduce agency costs. We find a decrease in the number of debt issues containing such covenants and the total debt subject to such covenants. We find no such decrease during the same period for a sample of non-banking firms, or for banks during a subsequent period.