Although internal control over financial reporting has gained increasing regulatory attention, its enforcement is far from perfect; thus, firm‐specific incentives to management become important to increase the quality of financial reports. We study how owners can motivate managers to invest in accounting quality even though it is costly to the managers. Using an agency model, we establish that a sufficiently conservative accounting system (which understates performance) is necessary to induce a manager to invest in accounting quality, and more conservatism increases this investment. The reason is that higher accounting quality mitigates the expected reduction of the manager's compensation from conservatively measured performance. Higher accounting quality makes the performance measure more precise, and the owner optimally lowers incentives, even though that entails some loss of productivity. In total, more conservatism increases both firm value and accounting quality. Our findings suggest that striving for neutral accounting can counteract incentives to improve accounting quality, and they provide support to using conservatism as a metric of financial reporting quality in empirical studies.

A widely held assumption in policy making and empirical research is that increasing the strength of public enforcement improves financial reporting quality and audit quality. This paper provides a more nuanced view. In a model with a manager who can manage earnings, a strategic auditor, and an enforcement institution, we show that enforcement and auditing are complements in a weak enforcement regime but can be substitutes in a strong regime. Although stronger enforcement always mitigates earnings management, the effects of different instruments of strengthening enforcement are ambiguous. We show that they can improve or impair financial reporting quality and audit quality, depending on production risk, accounting system characteristics, and the scope of auditing relative to enforcement.

This paper examines the usual claim that tighter accounting standards reduce earnings management and provide more relevant information to the capital market. We distinguish between accounting and real earnings management and assume that a standard setter can only influence accounting earnings management by the tightness of standards. In a rational expectations equilibrium model, we find that earnings quality increases with tighter standards, but we identify several consequences that may outweigh this benefit. First, managers increase costly real earnings management because the higher earnings quality increases the marginal benefit of real earnings management. Second, tighter standards can increase rather than decrease expected accounting and total earnings management. Third, the expected total costs of earnings management can also increase. We provide conditions for the occurrence of each of these effects.