caa a22 4500 60548306X CHVBK 20210128100429.0 cr unu---uuuuu 210128e20150501xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s10551-014-2107-x doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s10551-014-2107-x The Impact of CFOs' Incentives and Earnings Management Ethics on their Financial Reporting Decisions: The Mediating Role of Moral Disengagement [Elektronische Daten] [Cathy Beaudoin, Anna Cianci, George Tsakumis] Despite regulatory reforms aimed at inhibiting aggressive financial reporting, earnings management persists and continues to concern practitioners, regulators, and standard setters. To provide insight into this practice and how to mitigate it, we conduct an experiment to examine the impact of two independent variables on CFOs' discretionary expense accruals. One independent variable, incentive conflict, is manipulated at two levels (present and absent)—i.e., the presence or absence of a personal financial incentive that conflicts with a corporate financial incentive. The other independent variable is CFOs' earnings management ethics ("EM-Ethics,” high vs. low), measured as their assessment of the ethicalness of key earnings management motivations. We find that incentive conflict and EM-Ethics interact to determine CFOs' discretionary accruals such that (a) in the presence of incentive conflict, CFOs with low (high) EM-Ethics tend to give into (resist) the personal incentive by booking higher (lower) expense accruals; and (b) in the absence of an incentive conflict, CFOs with low (high) EM-Ethics tend to give into (resist) the corporate incentive by booking lower (higher) expense accruals. We also find support for a mediated-moderation model in which CFOs' level of EM-Ethics influences their moral disengagement tendencies which, in turn, differentially affect their discretionary accruals, depending on the presence or absence of incentive conflict. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2014 Dispositional ethics nationallicence Earnings management nationallicence Incentives nationallicence Moral disengagement nationallicence Beaudoin Cathy Accounting Faculty, School of Business Administration, University of Vermont, 05405, Burlington, VT, USA aut Cianci Anna Accounting Faculty, School of Business, Wake Forest University, 27109, Winston Salem, NC, USA aut Tsakumis George Department of Accounting & MIS, Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware, 19716, Newark, DE, USA aut Journal of Business Ethics Springer Netherlands 128/3(2015-05-01), 505-518 0167-4544 128:3<505 2015 128 10551 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2107-x text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2107-x text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Beaudoin Cathy Accounting Faculty, School of Business Administration, University of Vermont, 05405, Burlington, VT, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Cianci Anna Accounting Faculty, School of Business, Wake Forest University, 27109, Winston Salem, NC, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 700 1- Tsakumis George Department of Accounting & MIS, Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware, 19716, Newark, DE, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Journal of Business Ethics Springer Netherlands 128/3(2015-05-01), 505-518 0167-4544 128:3<505 2015 128 10551