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ABSTRACTManuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: We examine the effect of compensation committee quality on the association between CEO cash compensation and accounting earnings and the moderating effects of growth opportunities and earnings status.Research Findings/Insights: Using a sample of 812 US firms, we find that CEO cash compensation is more positively associated with accounting earnings when firms have high compensation committee quality. We also find that the positive effect of compensation committee quality on the association between CEO cash compensation and accounting earnings is less for high growth firms or loss‐making firms.Theoretical Implications: We contribute to the agency‐based research on CEO compensation by: 1) directly examining the impact of compensation committee quality on the sensitivity of CEO cash compensation to accounting earnings; 2) examining whether the role of compensation committee quality varies across firms; and 3) developing a broader and richer measure of compensation committee quality.Practical Implications: Our findings imply that shareholders and directors should be concerned about the composition of compensation committees as we find that compensation committee quality varies depending on compensation committee size and other characteristics of the committee members. Our findings also imply that for compensation committee members, there are greater challenges in monitoring CEO compensation contracts for firms with high growth or that incur losses. Further, our findings imply that even when all compensation committees are regulated to be fully independent, there are still quality differences among these independent compensation committees.

This study investigates whether investor protection affects the efficient communication of private information about future prospects through income smoothing. While prior research suggests that the level of earnings management differs between high and low investor protection countries, we examine whether the underlying motive for earnings management differs between high and low investor protection countries. Using firm-level data from 44 countries for 1993 to 2002 and Tucker and Zarowin's (2006) method to measure earnings informativeness, we find that earnings informativeness is more positively associated with income smoothing in countries with strong investor protection than it is in countries with weak investor protection. Our findings suggest that managers in weak investor protection countries are more likely to use income smoothing for opportunistic reasons while managers in strong investor protection countries are more likely to use income smoothing to convey their private information about future earnings. The results are robust through various additional analyses. More broadly, our results suggest that the role of accounting discretion is affected by a country's institutional infrastructure, specifically, its ability to provide protection for outside shareholders.

This paper examines whether a firm's level of voluntary disclosure varies with its level of global diversification. We argue that information asymmetries and agency costs arising from the global diversification of operations and financing increase the incentives for firms to disclose at a higher level. We measure global diversification of operations by factor-analyzing foreign shareholdings and foreign debt, and we measure global diversification of financing by factor-analyzing foreign sales and foreign subsidiaries. Using a sample of 216 firms from 17 countries selected from Fortune's Global 500 list and Botosan's (1997) disclosure index, we find that the level of voluntary disclosure is positively related to the extent of global operations, but is not related to the extent of global financing.

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This paper examines the value relevance of voluntary disclosures about intangibles in eight East Asian countries, and the effect of variation in company-level and country-level governance on the valuation of these disclosures. Using Easton and Sommers' (2003) deflated valuation approach in analyses involving 459 companies, we find that the voluntary disclosures are value relevant, over and above the numbers in the balance sheet and income statement. We also find that the value relevance of these disclosures is conditional on the level of director ownership and the strength of the institutional features of a country.