Do CFOs Have Style? An Empirical Investigation of the Effect of Individual CFOs on Accounting Practices

作者：Ge Weili^*; Matsumoto Dawn; Zhang Jenny Li

来源：Contemporary Accounting Research, 2011, 28(4): 1141-+.

DOI：10.1111/j.1911-3846.2011.01097.x

This paper examines the effect of Chief Financial Officers' (CFOs') individual philosophy or "style" on corporate accounting choices. We track 359 CFOs across different firms over time and investigate whether CFO-specific factors explain a firm's accounting choices. We find that, across a wide range of accounting choices, individual CFOs are an important determinant of accounting practices. Moreover, the effect of CFO styles appears to be stronger under conditions of high CFO discretion and high CFO job demands. We also trace the CFO style to observable CFO characteristics by examining whether CFOs' gender, age, and educational background affect their styles. We find limited evidence of the impact of these CFO characteristics on accounting choices, suggesting that these common and observable characteristics capture only a small portion of CFO styles. Taken together, our findings expand the literature on the determinants of accounting choices by highlighting manager-specific factors as a new dimension of determinants worth considering for future work in the area.

• 出版日期2011