Corporate governance, accounting conservatism, and management behavior

Abstract

This paper consists of two essays that examine whether corporate governance and accounting conservatism influences management behavior such as corporate layoff decisions and philanthropic giving decisions. In the first essay, I investigate whether and how accounting conservatism plays a disciplinary role in corporate layoffs. I find that accounting conservatism mitigates the extent of under-hiring from excessive layoffs as it helps the troubled firms issue more debt around layoff announcements. In the second essay, I investigate business groups’ strategic coordination of group-wide corporate charitable contributions. In particular, I find that controlling shareholders allocate excessive amount of charitable contributions to their public affiliates compared with private affiliates in order to tunnel business group resources out to controlling shareholders who hold a larger portion of private affiliates than public affiliates