Employment horizon and the choice of performance measures: empirical evidence from annual bonus plans of loss-making entities

We examine the extent to which employment horizon concerns affect the relative emphasis on financial versus nonfinancial performance measures in annual bonus plans. We argue that managers of loss-making firms are likely to voluntarily or forcibly depart in the near future and, consequently, have a shorter employment horizon. Loss-making firms then need to increase the emphasis on forward-looking nonfinancial performance measures to motivate long-term effort of their managers. Thus, we hypothesize that the emphasis on nonfinancial performance measures is greater in loss making than in profitable firms even after controlling for the informativeness of earnings. We find consistent support for our hypothesis using different (archival, survey, and field) data sources and various proxies for short employment horizon and the emphasis on nonfinancial performance measures

Earnings targets and annual bonus incentives

We examine the extent to which firms use past performance as a basis for setting earnings targets in their bonus plans and assess the implications of such targets for managerial incentives. We find that high-profitability firms commonly decrease earnings targets when their managers fail to meet prior-year targets but rarely increase targets. Conversely, we find that low-profitability firms commonly increase earnings targets when their managers meet or exceed prior-year targets but rarely decrease targets. This targetrevision process yields a serial correlation in target difficulty—targets remain relatively easy (or difficult) through time. We also find that firms are reluctant to revise earnings targets below zero, resulting in an unusually high frequency of zero earnings targets that are abnormally difficult to achieve. Collectively, our findings suggest that firms incorporate past performance information into targets, yet they do so only to a limited extent. This is consistent with theoretical arguments that highlight the benefits of contractual commitments