We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and contrast the performance of centralized and delegated forms of investment decision-making. We find that delegation improves the manager's innovation incentives. We identify conditions for each of the two organizational forms to emerge as the optimal choice, and relate these conditions to characteristics of firms' investment opportunity sets.

A firm with two divisions, each run by a risk-averse manager, contracts with the two managers to operate their divisions and possibly engage in interdivisional trade. Each division can increase the total surplus generated through interdivisional trade by making costly relationship-specific investments. The terms of trade are determined through negotiations between the two managers. Managerial compensation contracts are linear functions of divisional profit and firm-wide profit. If managers are compensated solely on the basis of their divisional profits, they invest less than the first-best amounts. While compensation contracts based on firm-wide profits alone can induce first-best investments, they impose extra risk on risk-averse managers. Therefore, we find that optimal linear compensation contracts will contain both divisional and firm-wide components. Our analysis also identifies a feature of negotiated transfer pricing, namely interdivisional risk sharing, and characterizes its impact on the design of optimal contracts.

This paper studies how information disclosure affects investment efficiency and investor welfare in a dynamic setting in which a firm makes sequential investments to adjust its capital stock over time. We show that the effects of accounting disclosures on investment efficiency and investor welfare crucially depend on whether such disclosures convey information about the firm's future capital stock (i.e., balance sheet) or about its future operating cash flows (i.e., earnings). Specifically, investment efficiency and investor welfare unambiguously increase in the precision of disclosures that convey information about the future capital stock, since such disclosures mitigate the current owners' incentives to underinvest. In contrast, when accounting reports provide information about future cash flows, the firm can have incentives to either under- or overinvest depending on the precision of accounting reports and the expected growth in demand. For such disclosures, investment efficiency and investor welfare are maximized by an intermediate level of precision. The two types of accounting disclosures act as substitutes in that the precision of capital stock disclosures that maximizes investment efficiency (and investor welfare) decreases as cash flow disclosures become more informative and vice versa.

This paper examines how various revenue recognition rules affect the incentive properties of accounting information in a stewardship setting. Our analysis demonstrates that if revenues are recognized according to the realization principle, a single performance measure based on aggregated accounting information can be used to provide desirable production and effort incentives to the manager. In contrast, mark‐to‐market accounting does not provide efficient aggregation of raw information to solve the stewardship problem. Mark‐to‐market accounting, though sensible from a valuation perspective, fails to provide desirable incentives because it relies on the anticipated, rather than the actual, performance of the manager. We also consider a setting in which the manager can control the timing of the firm’s sales. It then becomes desirable to modify the realization principle and apply the lower‐of‐cost‐or‐market valuation rule. The desirable accounting thus exhibits a conservative bias.

We study how information disclosure affects the cost of equity capital and investor welfare in a dynamic setting. We show that a firm’s cost of capital decreases (increases) in the precision of public disclosure if the firm’s growth rate is below (above) a certain threshold. The threshold growth rate is higher when the firm’s cash flows are more persistent, or when other firms in the economy are growing at low rates. While current shareholders always prefer maximum public disclosure, future shareholders’ welfare decreases (increases) in the precision of public disclosure if the firm’s growth rate is below (above) the threshold.

We examine the optimal choice of hurdle rates in a capital budgeting setting in which a manager receives superior information regarding the profitability of an investment project. Unlike the prior capital budgeting literature that treats the distribution of investment returns as exogenous, we consider a scenario in which the manager can engage in upfront project development activities to improve the quality of investment opportunity. To motivate the project development effort while ensuring truthful information flow, the optimal hurdle rate is always lower than what it would be if the manager's project development effort were directly observable. We show that the optimal hurdle rate can even be below the firm's cost of capital under plausible circumstances. We also examine how the optimal hurdle rate varies with the ex ante quality of the firm's investment opportunities, and find that optimal hurdle rates will be higher in firms whose investment opportunities are relatively good or relatively poor than in firms with investment opportunities of intermediate quality.

This paper investigates how strategic trading around the time of earnings announcements affects market liquidity (e.g., bid‐ask spreads). We model an investor with private information in advance of an earnings announcement (e.g., inside information). The investor trades before and after the earnings announcement in a market populated by liquidity‐motivated traders who have some discretion over the timing of their trades. The main result of the analysis is that an earnings announcement that reduces an insider's private information may lead to a less liquid market in the postannouncement period.

Using a financial reporting and valuation model, we investigate the construct validity of Basu's (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) regression coefficient as a measure of conditional conservatism in corporate financial reporting. We predict that the AT coefficient will be positive even in the absence of conditional conservatism, and it will vary with non-accounting factors even if the degree of conditional conservatism is held constant. Our empirical analysis shows that AT coefficient estimates vary in directions predicted by our theory. Specifically, we find that AT coefficient estimates increase with expected returns and asymmetry in the distribution of returns, and decrease with cash flow persistence. Importantly, we identify the spread between the variances of bad news and good news accruals as an alternative measure of conditional conservatism that is free of the effects confounding the AT coefficient. Consistent with a key implication of conditional conservatism, we find that the variance of bad news accruals is significantly higher than the variance of good news accruals primarily due to conditionally conservative accruals related to inventory write-downs, long-term asset write-downs, and goodwill impairments. A series of placebo tests provides additional support for the construct validity of our alternative measure of conditional conservatism. Data Availability: Data are publicly available from the sources indicated in the text.