Auditor Conservatism, Incentive Compensation, and the Quality of Financial Reporting

This paper examines how performance-based compensation for managers influences their reporting behavior and the resulting stance auditors take when deciding whether to certify a manager’s report. The paper makes endogenous the stance auditors take: with a more conservative stance, auditors are less likely to certify an inflated report, but are more likely to refuse to certify an accurate one. The auditor’s tradeoff between these two error types, and the resulting interplay with the level of performance-based pay for managers, play a critical role in determining the level of managerial misreporting, investor welfare, and a number of other key variables. The paper finds that (1) strengthening the link between pay and reported performance can result in a weaker link between pay and actual performance and, consequently, lower managerial effort; (2) conservatism among auditors improves performance measurement; and (3) raising penalties on managers for overstating earnings can reduce audit quality and harm investors, while raising penalties on auditors for certifying overstated results does not harm investors. (JEL D82, G30, G34, G38, K22, M40, M52)