To deter financial misstatements, many companies have recently adopted compensation recovery policies—commonly known as ‘‘clawbacks’’—that authorize the board to recoup compensation paid to executives based on misstated financial reports. Clawbacks have been shown to reduce financial misstatements and increase investors’ confidence on earnings information. We show that the benefits come with an unintended consequence of certain firms substituting for accruals management with real transactions management (e.g., reduce research and development [R&D] expenditures), especially firms with strong incentives to achieve short-term earnings targets, such as firms with high growth or high transient institutional ownership. As such, the total amount of earnings management does not decrease subsequent to clawback adoption. We further show that although real transactions management temporarily boosts those clawback adopters’ short-term profitability and stock performance, this trend reverses after three years. In summary, clawbacks may have unexpected effects for a subset of firms whose managers are under greater pressure to meet earnings goals.

This study investigates how relative performance information (RPI) affects employee performance and allocation of effort across tasks in a multi-task environment. Based on behavioral theories, we predict that the social comparison process inherent in RPI induces both a motivation effect that results in increased effort as well as an effort distortion effect that results in the distortion of effort allocations across tasks away from the firm-preferred allocations. We also predict that both effects are magnified when the RPI is public compared to private. We argue that although the motivation effect will generally benefit performance, the effort distortion effect may be detrimental to performance. We design an experiment that isolates these two effects. Consistent with our predictions, we find that RPI induces both motivation and effort distortion effects and that both effects are magnified when the RPI is public rather than private. Although the motivation effect increases performance, we demonstrate that the effort distortion effect can decrease performance. By isolating the motivation and effort distortion effects, our study provides insights into the costs and benefits of RPI in a multi-task environment. As such, it informs accountants regarding the design of information systems and when tasks should be aggregated or disaggregated across employees. Data Availability: Data are available from the authors upon request.

This study evaluates the relation between security returns and funds-based earnings components. We document that proxies for market expectations of the components that are based on measures of historical serial- and cross-dependencies are substantially more accurate than random-walk proxies. Moreover, we detect significantly higher valuations of the operating cash flow component of earnings, relative to current accruals, when market expectations are represented using the dependency-based predictions. Such differential valuation is not detectable for random-walk representations. Contrary to results in Ali (1994), we find incremental information in unexpected cash flows over the whole spectrum (moderate and extreme) of unexpected cash flow realizations.

A 1978 survey of undergraduate tax courses offered at U.S. universities and colleges provides information about course content, instructional materials, and teaching methods for accounting professors involved with the design and implementation of the tax curriculum.

The task assigned the 1962 Courses and Curricula Committee of the American Accounting Association was "to develop criteria for selecting the content and quality of collegiate accounting educational materials to provide adequate instruction in the body of knowledge that is accounting." The 1961 Committee, which was kept intact for a second year, decided that this task was possible after it discarded other more limited objectives because they involved too many restrictive assumptions to produce useful conclusions. To reduce its task to manageable proportions, the Committee decided to exclude so-called "service" courses, in which accounting is taught primarily to students who are preparing for careers other than accounting careers. For example, the first course in accounting is not considered, since it is offered primarily for those students who do not plan to go on in accounting. As a result, these recommendations apply only to schools which have as one of their objectives educating college students who intend to enter the business world as accountants in industrial, governmental, or public accounting organizations.

In 1940 the labor force participation rate for married women, husband present, was 14 percent. By 1970 it had increased 26 percentage points to 40 percent. The supply and demand variables associated with this increase have been widely investigated. However, there has been ve'ry little research on the economic effects of wives' labor force participation. (See R. Agarwala and J. Drinkwater, Margaret Carroll, Robert Holbrook and Frank Stafford, Lucy Mallan and Jacob Mincer.) This paper analyzes two economic effects: the effect on the ratio of consumption to income (CIY) and the effect on the ratio of durable goods purchases to income (DurlY). The primary question addressed is: Controlling for total family income and several other variables, what are the differences (if any) in the ratios of CIY and DurlY for working-wife (W-W) and nonworking wife (N-W-W) families? Looked at in another way, the question may be rephrased: How do W-W families use wives' income?

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant contemporaneous supply-side factors. We show that brand preferences form endogenously, are highly persistent, and explain 40 percent of geographic variation in market shares. Counterfactuals suggest that brand preferences create large entry barriers and durable advantages for incumbent firms and can explain the persistence of early-mover advantage over long periods.