The Role of Information and Financial Reporting in Corporate Governance and Debt Contracting

We review recent literature on the role of financial reporting transparency in reducing governance-related agency conflicts among managers, directors, and shareholders, as well as in reducing agency conflicts between shareholders and creditors, and offer researchers some suggested avenues for future research. Key themes include the endogenous nature of debt contracts and governance mechanisms with respect to information asymmetry between contracting parties, the heterogeneous nature of the informational demands of contracting parties, and the heterogeneous nature of the resulting governance and debt contracts. We also emphasize the role of a commitment to financial reporting transparency in facilitating informal multiperiod contracts among managers, directors, shareholders, and creditors

Write -Offs and Restructuring Charges: Evidence From SFAS No. 121 and EITF 94 -3 Mandatory Disclosures

100 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.The final part of the study presents evidence that the use of questionable restructuring charges is widespread. Further, restructuring accruals are correlated with operating income in the period in which they are paid out, which implies that these payouts may have been more appropriately classified as operating costs of that period. Additional findings are that the market reaction to the announcement of restructurings containing questionable charges is weaker than for restructuring charges in general and management changes and poor earnings increase the likelihood that a firm will take questionable restructuring charges.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Pension plan accounting estimates and the freezing of defined benefit pension plans

This study provides evidence that, when "hard" freezing their defined benefit pension plans, employers select downward biased accounting assumptions to exaggerate the economic burden of their benefit plans. Downward biased expected rates of return and discount rates allow managers to increase reported pension expenses and, for discount rates, allow managers to increase reported pension liabilities. We find that prior to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, both rates are downward biased when firms freeze their plans, whereas after SOX the bias is lower. This finding is consistent with managers opportunistically biasing pension estimates to obtain labor concessions during periods of reduced regulatory scrutiny.Defined benefit pension plans Pension plan freeze Expected rate of return assumption Discount rate assumption Sarbanes-Oxley Act