文档介绍：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 prehensive 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 res