Most firms covary more positively with downmarkets than upmarkets—a phenomenon I refer to as “risk asymmetry.” I predict and find that risk asymmetry is caused, at least in part, by a firm's ability to selectively obfuscate poor performance. Risk asymmetry decreases significantly when firms are required to adhere to the more stringent auditing standards mandated under Section 404 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act, however this decrease is more muted for firms with weak internal controls. Consistent with my predictions, these patterns are stronger for more market‐sensitive firms and weaker for firms that include relative performance evaluation in their CEOs' pay packages. Taken together with prior literature (which documents that risk asymmetry is priced), my results suggest that a firm can lower its cost of capital by credibly reducing its ability to obfuscate value‐relevant information.

A 2006 rule change in the United States mandated that publicly traded firms provide more detailed disclosures about executives’ compensation plans. In response to the new disclosure requirements, Cournot firms with large market shares add revenue-based pay to their CEOs’ pay packages. This change in pay practices coincides with a shift towards more aggressive product market equilibria, characterized by greater production expenditures and lower margins. Jointly, these patterns are consistent with predictions from the theory of “strategic delegation,” and suggest that the new disclosure requirements enhanced the viability of committing through executive incentives. After adopting the new disclosure requirements, many firms appear to restructure their executives’ pay packages as strategic devices designed to make rivals curtail their competitive actions.

We examine whether the potential for costly sabotage is a deterrent to firms' use of relative performance evaluation (“RPE”) in CEO pay plans. We exploit illegal cartel membership as a source of variation in the potential for costly sabotage and document that firms are more likely to use RPE if they are currently cartel members. Moreover, firms frequently drop RPE from their CEOs’ pay plans immediately after their cartels are detected, dissolved and punished. We further provide suggestive evidence that the potential for costly sabotage explains these patterns; cartel membership severs the empirical association between RPE and competitive aggression.

Many firms use relative stock performance to evaluate and incentivize their CEOs. We document that such firms routinely disclose information that harms their peers' stock prices, and sometimes explicitly mention the harmed peers, by name, in these disclosures. Consistent with deliberate sabotage, peer‐harming disclosures appear to be aimed at peers whose stock price depressions are most likely to benefit the disclosing firms' CEOs. The pricing effect of these disclosures does not reverse, suggesting that the disclosures contain legitimate information regarding peers' prospects. In sum, our results suggest that relative performance evaluation in CEO pay motivates CEOs to internalize the externalities of their disclosures, and strategically disclose information that harms peers' stock prices, in order to improve their firms' relative standing within their peer group.

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers, essentially making it easier for accounting professionals to move across countries. Our research design compares the cross-border migration of accounting professionals relative to tightly matched other professionals before and after regulatory harmonization. We find that international labor migration in the accounting profession increases significantly relative to other professions. We provide evidence that this effect is due to harmonization, rather than increases in the demand for accounting services during the implementation of the rule changes. The findings illustrate that diversity in rules constitutes an economic barrier to cross-border labor mobility and, more specifically, that accounting harmonization can have a meaningful effect on cross-border migration.

The negative effects of common ownership on competition have received significant attention, but many proposed mechanisms for institutional investor influence seem implausible. We develop and test an analytical model of optimal compensation in an oligopoly with common ownership, focusing on revenue-based pay as a plausible channel through which institutional investors might influence competition. Our model implies a negative effect of common ownership on firms’ use of revenue-based pay. Using both associative analyses and an event study difference-in-differences design based on plausibly exogenous institutional mergers, we find no evidence of a negative relation between common ownership and the use of revenue-based pay, except in an economically small subsample of extremely concentrated owners. Results involving relative performance incentives are similar. Collectively, our results provide no support for the notion that cross-owning blockholders in general influence compensation contracts in order to soften executives’ incentives to compete aggressively. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Agents often inflate measured performance by distorting operating decisions (e.g., real earnings management) and/or reporting decisions (e.g., accruals management). Across four studies, we find that public judgments of distortion’s acceptability largely reflect assessments of how harmful and norm-violating the distortion is. Judgments of operating distortion primarily reflect assessments of harm, whereas judgments of reporting distortion primarily reflect assessments of norm violation. These results are consistent with the Theory of Dyadic Morality (Gray, Waytz, and Young 2012; Schein and Gray 2018). We also find that those who perceive an accounting system as more unfairly withholding an agent’s bonus assess distortion (especially reporting distortion) to be less norm-violating. Those who perceive the performance measure as less appropriate for capturing the value of performance to stakeholders assess distortion (especially operating distortion) to be more harmful. Assessments of distortions’ harm and norm violation explain a substantial portion of the variation in acceptability judgments.