A large body of research is devoted to understanding the causes and consequences of firms' adoption of internationally recognized accounting standards. Thus far, researchers' attention has focused almost exclusively on the informational benefits of the adoption. We extend the existing literature by offering a different, stewardship perspective. We hypothesize that the voluntary adoption of international accounting standards is associated with changes in the firm's internal performance evaluation process; in particular, it is associated with increases in the sensitivities of CEO turnover and employee layoffs to accounting earnings. Our results are consistent with these predictions.

Exploiting the setting of staggered adoption of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) in U.S. state courts, we examine how quasi-exogenous restrictions of outside employment opportunities affect CEO compensation structure. The IDD adoption constrains executives' ability to work for competitors, which likely decreases CEOs' tendency to take risks by increasing the cost of job loss and reducing the reward to risk taking. We expect the board to respond by increasing the sensitivity of CEO wealth to stock volatility (vega) to encourage risk taking. We find a significant increase in vega post-IDD adoption. The effect is stronger among CEOs with greater career concerns. The effect also increases with the ex ante CEO mobility and the importance of trade secrets, suggesting the board increases vega more when there is a greater reduction in CEO outside opportunities. Overall, we provide new evidence on how external labor market frictions affect the convexity of CEO compensation.