Leone, Wu, and Zimmerman [Leone, A., Wu, J., Zimmerman, J., 2005. Asymmetric sensitivity of CEO cash compensation to stock returns. Journal of Accounting and Economics, forthcoming] find that cash compensation (salary and bonus) is more sensitive to price decreases than to price increases. The authors interpret this result as consistent with Boards of Directors exercising discretion to reduce costly ex post settling up in cash compensation. I discuss potential alternative explanations. Specifically, the design of bonus contracts and the placement of the upper bound, and the effect of the Internal Revenue Code Section 162 (m) that limits the deductibility of cash compensation over one million dollars. I also link their results to the managerial power and rent extraction perspective.

This paper investigates circumstances under which accruals are predicted to improve earnings' ability to measure firm performance, as reflected in stock returns. The importance of accruals is hypothesized to increase (i) the shorter the performance measurement interval, (ii) the greater the volatility of the firm's working capital requirements and investment and financing activities, and (iii) the longer the firm's operating cycle. Under each of these circumstances, cash flows are predicted to suffer more severely from timing and matching problems that reduce their ability to reflect firm performance. The results of empirical tests are consistent with these predictions.

A model of earnings, cash flows and accruals is developed assuming a random walk sales process, variable and fixed costs, and that the only accruals are accounts receivable and payable, and inventory. The model implies earnings better predict future operating cash flows than current operating cash flows and the difference varies with the operating cash cycle. Also, the model is used to predict serial and cross-correlations of each firm's series. The implications and predictions are tested on a 1337 firm sample over 1963–1992. Both earnings and cash flow forecast implications and correlation predictions are generally consistent with the data.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that CEOs in their final years of office manage discretionary investment expenditures to improve short-term earnings performance. We examine the behavior of R & D expenditures for a sample of firms in industries that have significant ongoing R & D activities. The results suggest that CEOs spend less on R & D during their final years in office. However, we find the reductions in R & D expenditures are mitigated through CEO stock ownership. There is no evidence that the reduced R & D expenditures are associated with either poor firm performance or reductions in investment expenditures that are capitalized for accounting purposes.

Accounting rules for valuing retained interest from securitizations require management to make assumptions concerning discount rates, default rates, and prepayment rates. These assumptions provide management with discretion to determine the “gain on sale” of the receivables. We investigate whether CEO compensation is less sensitive to securitization gains than to other earnings components in the presence of proxies for how independent (outsiders, females, fewer CEO-selected directors) and informed (financial expertise) directors are. Overall, our results do not suggest that better “monitoring” reduces earnings management or CEO pay-sensitivity to reported securitization gains. Our results suggest that CEOs are rewarded for the gains they report and boards do not intervene.

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the residual income valuation model proposed in Ohlson (Ohlson, J.A., 1995. Earnings, book values and dividends in security valuation. Contemporary Accounting Research 11, 661–687). We point out that existing empirical research relying on Ohlson's model is similar to past research relying explicitly on the dividend-discounting model. We establish that the key original empirical implications of Ohlson's model stem from the information dynamics that link current information to future residual income. Our empirical results generally support Ohlson's information dynamics. However, we find that our empirical implementation of Ohlson's model provides only minor improvements over existing attempts to implement the dividend-discounting model by capitalizing short-term earnings' forecasts in perpetuity.

Researchers have used various measures as indications of “earnings quality” including persistence, accruals, smoothness, timeliness, loss avoidance, investor responsiveness, and external indicators such as restatements and SEC enforcement releases. For each measure, we discuss causes of variation in the measure as well as consequences. We reach no single conclusion on what earnings quality is because “quality” is contingent on the decision context. We also point out that the “quality” of earnings is a function of the firm’s fundamental performance. The contribution of a firm’s fundamental performance to its earnings quality is suggested as one area for future work.