What Does CEOs' Pay-for-Performance Reveal About Shareholders' Attitude Toward Earnings Overstatements?
78 Pages Posted: 10 Sep 2009 Last revised: 29 Apr 2015
Date Written: April 28, 2015
Abstract
If overstatements were a symptom of the agency conflict, pay-for-performance sensitivities should have increased in response to the additional penalties for misreporting imposed by SOX. Our finding of their decrease is inconsistent with the view that overstatements were an unintended consequence of incentive pay prior to 2002. To corroborate our interpretation, we show that (i) CEO pay-for-performance sensitivities are higher among firms whose shareholders stand to benefit from overstatements; (ii) this cross-sectional relationship weakens significantly after SOX; and (iii) the within-firm decrease in pay-for-performance sensitivity is most pronounced among firms with high pre-SOX shareholder benefits from overstatements.
Keywords: business ethics; CEO incentives; corporate governance; earnings management; executive compensation; financial constraint; firm objectives; institutional investment horizon; pay-for-performance sensitivity; principal-agent; Sarbanes-Oxley Act; shareholder pressure
JEL Classification: G32, G34, J33, L21, M41, M43, M52
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting
By Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon
-
The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting
By Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon
-
The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting
By Simi Kedia and Thomas Philippon
-
The Economics of Fraudulent Accounting
By Semi Kedia and Thomas Philippon
-
By Paul Povel, Rajdeep Singh, ...
-
By Paul Povel, Rajdeep Singh, ...
-
Insider Trading Before Accounting Scandals
By Anup Agrawal and Tommy Cooper