Measuring Misreporting Incentives and Severity

The authors thank Ranjani Krishnan (editor), the anonymous associate editor, and the two anonymous reviewers for their thorough review and constructive comments. The authors acknowledge data assistance by Anton Bubnov, Michel Coset, Ronald Horst, Joha Ndibatunganya, Violeta Shtereva, Hui Mei Tam, Suzanne Weele, and Sandra Wubben. The authors also thank Bianca Beyer, Francois Brochet, Byung Hun Chung, Richard Crowley, Frank Ecker, Stephen Glaeser, Jingru Gao, Flora Kuang, Chuchu Liang, Kelvin Law, Laurence van Lent, Maximilian Müller, Terence Ng, Dirk Simons, Hun Tong Tan, Wei Zeng, Xiuye Zhang, and seminar participants at Australian National University; Cass Business School; Copenhagen Business School; Erasmus University Rotterdam; Frankfurt School of Finance and Management; Jinan University; Nanyang Technological University; Stockholm School of Economics; Tilburg University; University of Graz; University of Melbourne; University of Queensland; University of St. Gallen; the American Accounting Association Conference; the Conference on Investor Protection, Corporate Governance, and Fraud Prevention; the European Accounting Association Conference; the Midyear Meeting of the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section; the Fox Business School Conference; the MIT Asia Conference; the Nordic Accounting Conference; the Swiss Accounting Research Alpine Camp; and the Doctoral Summer Program in Accounting Research (SPAR). Previous versions of this paper circulated under the titles “Pay-for-Performance Sensitivity of CEO Equity Compensation and Financial Misreporting: Evidence from the Personal Wealth Pursuit of CEOs,” “CEO Equity Compensation and Financial Misreporting: Evidence from the Motive of Misreporting” and “Equity Incentives, Agency Conflict, and CEO Wealth-Pursuing Misreporting.”