Sunil Dutta

The Effect of Earnings Forecasts on Earnings Management

We develop a theory of the association between earnings management and voluntary management forecasts in an agency setting. Earnings management is modeled as a “window dressing” action that can increase the firm’s reported accounting earnings but has no impact on the firm’s real cash flows. Earnings forecasts are modeled as the manager’s communication of the firm’s future cash flows. We show that it is easier to prevent the manager from managing earnings if he is asked to forecast earnings. We also show that earnings management is more likely to follow high earnings forecasts than low earnings forecasts. Finally, our analysis shows that shareholders may not find it optimal to prohibit earnings management. Earlier results rationalize earnings management by violating some assumption underlying the Revelation Principle. By contrast, in our model the principal can make full commitments and communication is unrestricted. Nonetheless, earnings management can be beneficial as it reduces the cost of eliciting truthful forecasts.

Controlling Investment Decisions: Depreciation- and Capital Charges

This paper examines a multiperiod principal-agent model in which a divisional manager has superior information regarding the profitability of an investment project available to his division. The manager also contributes to the periodic operating cash flows of his division through personally costly effort. We demonstrate that it is optimal for the principal to delegate the investment decision and to base the managers compensation on the residual income performance measure. Our analysis points to a class of depreciation rules and to a particular capital charge rate which together ensure that a profitable (unprofitable) project makes a positive (negative) contribution to residual income in every period. As a consequence, the compensation parameters for each period can be chosen freely so as to address the moral hazard problems without impacting the managers investment incentives.

Negotiated Transfer Pricing and Divisional vs. Firm‐Wide Performance Evaluation

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.

Asset Valuation and Performance Measurement in a Dynamic Agency Setting

This paper examines the choice of asset valuation rules from a managerial control perspective. A manager creates value for a firm through his effort choices. To support its operating activities, the firm also engages in financing activities such as credit sales to its customers. Since such financing activities merely change the pattern of cash flows across periods, an optimal compensation scheme must shield the manager from the risk associated with the financing activities. We show that residual income combined with fair value accounting for receivables eliminates this risk and provides an optimal performance measure. In contrast, compensation schemes based only on realized cash flows can be optimal only under exceptional circumstances. We also consider a setting in which there is sufficiently disaggregated information about periodic cash flows so as to eliminate not only the risk associated with financing activities but also the risk associated with customer defaults. The principal then wants to depart from fair value accounting.

The Interpretation of Information and Corporate Disclosure Strategies

This paper analyzes a setting in which a firms manager can credibly disclose facts, but not their valuation implications. Consequently, he is uncertain as to how those disclosed facts will be interpreted by investors. Introducing such uncertainty affects the managers disclosure strategy in two important ways. First, it becomes a function of the markets prior valuation of the firm since that valuation provides a clue as to how future disclosures are likely to be interpreted by investors. Second, the disclosure strategy is no longer characterized, in general, by a single good news/bad news partition of the managers private information.

Managerial Expertise, Private Information, and Pay-Performance Sensitivity

This paper characterizes optimal pay-performance sensitivities of compensation contracts for managers who have private information about their skills, and those skills affect their outside employment opportunities. The model presumes that the rate at which a managers opportunity wage increases in his expertise depends on the nature of that expertise, i.e., whether it is general or firm specific. The analysis demonstrates that when managerial expertise is largely firm specific (general), the optimal pay-performance sensitivity is lower (higher) than its optimal value in a benchmark setting of symmetric information. Furthermore, when managerial skills are largely firm specific (general), the optimal pay-performance sensitivity decreases (increases) as managerial skills become a more important determinant of firm performance. Unlike the standard agency-theoretic prediction of a negative trade-off between risk and pay-performance sensitivity, this paper identifies plausible circumstances under which risk and incentives are positively associated. In addition to providing an explanation for why empirical tests of risk-incentive relationships have produced mixed results, the analysis generates insights that can be useful in guiding future empirical research.

Cost Allocation for Capital Budgeting Decisions

Investment decisions frequently require coordination across multiple divisions of a firm. This paper explores a class of capital budgeting mechanisms in which the divisions issue reports regarding the anticipated profitability of proposed projects. To hold the divisions accountable for their reports, the central office ties the project acceptance decision to a system of cost allocations comprised of depreciation and capital charges. If the proposed project concerns a common asset that benefits multiple divisions, our analysis derives a sharing rule for dividing the asset among the users. Capital charges are based on a hurdle rate determined by the divisional reports. We find that this hurdle rate deviates from the firms cost of capital in a manner that depends crucially on whether the coordination problem is one of implementing a common asset or choosing among multiple competing projects. We also find that more severe divisional agency problems will increase the hurdle rate for common assets, yet this is generally not true for competing projects.

Dynamic Performance Measurement

This survey advocates the use of dynamic models to examine the incentive properties of commonly used accounting performance metrics. Drawing from recent work in this emerging field, the survey illustrates how one can use tractable multiperiod models to shed light on questions of fundamental interest to accountants. The author first examines the choice of goal congruent performance measures and then explains how the insights obtained from the goal congruent framework can be adapted to second-best contracting in formal agency models. Next, the author builds an analytically tractable multiperiod moral hazard model with a risk averse manager to examine the issue of aggregating accounting and nonaccounting information in constructing optimal performance measures.

Private and Public Disclosures and the Efficiency of Stock Prices

In this paper I examine the effects of private and public disclosures on the informational efficiency of stock prices. In addition to making a public announcement such as an earnings announcement, a public firm can make private disclosure to an analyst. If the analysts relative information advantage is below a threshold level, private disclosure to the analyst leads to more efficient stock price. I demonstrate that the allocation of information across market participants is an important determinant of price efficiency. While accounting regulators often argue the need for equal access to information, the paper shows that there are conditions under which a limited amount of informational inequality may lead to more efficient stock prices.

Information Disclosure, Real Investment, and Shareholder Welfare

This paper investigates the preferences of a firms current and future shareholders for the quality of mandated public disclosures in a dynamic setting with real investments. We find that while the firms investment monotonically increases in disclosure quality, the welfare of the firms current shareholders can be maximized by an imperfect disclosure regime. In particular, the current shareholders prefer an intermediate level of public disclosures if (i) the firms current assets in place are small relative to its future growth opportunities, and either (ii) the firms investment is observable by the stock market and sufficiently elastic with respect to the cost of capital, or (iii) the firms investment is not directly observable by the stock market and is sufficiently inelastic with respect to the cost of capital. The firms future shareholders prefer more precise public disclosures if the firm’s growth rate during their period of ownership is sufficiently high.