财务会计和公司治理【外文翻译】

原文：

Financial accounting and corporate governance: a discussion

The study of corporate governance is concerned with understanding the mechanisms that have evolved to mitigate incentive problems created by the separation of the management and financing of business entities. Financial accounting provides financiers with the primary source of independently verified information about the performance of managers. Thus, it is clear that corporate governance and financial accounting are inexorably linked. Indeed, many of the central features of financial accounting, such as the use of historical costs, the reliability criterion, the realization principle and theconservatism principle are difficult to understand unless one adopts a corporate governance perspective. Without governance problems, the role of financial accounting would be reduced to providing investors with the risk and return information required to facilitate the optimal portfolio allocation decision.

The review by Bushman and Smith (2001, B&S hereafter) therefore addresses an area of fundamental importance in financial accounting. B&S’s review focuses on two main areas of governance research. First, they provide a comprehensive summary and evaluation of research on the role of financial accounting information in managerial incentive contracts. Second, they propose an agenda for future research that builds on previous research exploiting cross-country differences in financial reporting and governance regimes.

While B&S provide a useful and thorough analysis in each of these two areas, my task is to identify potential limitations of their review. I identify three broad limitations. First, their proposed research agenda only analyzes the role of accounting information at a very macro-level. Second, they provide little in the 3 way of a critical assessment of the contributions of accounting scholars to governance research. Finally, they provide only a superficial discussion of the role of accounting in governance mechanisms other than managerial incentive contracts. Below, I discuss these limitations in more detail and suggest additional research

opportunities in this area.

One particular example is worthy of mention. Economically developed countries tend to have more highly regulated financial accounting systems, resulting in a positive correlation between economic performance and the CIFAR index. However, it would be dangerous to conclude that more accounting regulation leads to improved economic performance. Economic performance and financial accounting both thrived in numerous developed countries even before the introduction of extensive accounting regulation. In less-developed countries, costly regulation by opportunistic regulators may well hinder economic development.

Evaluation of Accounting Scholar s’ Contribution to Governance Research Governance research is truly interdisciplinary in nature, drawing heavily on the fields ofeconomics, finance, law and management. Accounting also has a potentially important role to play in governance research since, as I will discuss later in this review, accounting provides the information required for most governance mechanisms to operate efficiently. Indeed, some have attributed the tremendous success of U.S. capital markets to the sophistication of the U.S. financial reporting system.

Explicit Uses of Accounting Information in Corporate Governance The explicit use of accounting information in contracts between management and financiers represents perhaps the most visible use of accounting information in governance mechanisms. In particular, the use of accounting-based performance measures in managerial compensation contracts represents perhaps the best known and most heavily researched governance role of accounting information. B&S provide an excellent and comprehensive review of this research, and I have little to add. The one point that I would like to emphasize is that accounting-based compensation accounts for just a small proportion of the incentives for a typical top executive. Incentives provided by stock and option holdings tend to dominate (e.g., Murphy, 1985; Core, Guay and Verrecchia, 2000). Thus, the incredible amount of research in this area is perhaps overkill, given the relative insignificance of this particular role of accounting earnings.