Friday, February 18, 2011

Behavioral Motivations: When CEO’s Cook the Books & Why do firms issue financial misstatements?

Via Kellogg. H/T SimoleonSense. Great read. 
When the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s sent stock prices soaring, something else soared, too: CEOs’ perceptions of their net wealth. That theory alone may explain a large part of the psychology and behavior of why some corporate managers allowed their accounting books to get cooked.
On March 10, 2000, the dot-com bubble burst abruptly and as a result many firms had to issue accounting restatements well into the next decade. Let’s face it, a lot of people lost a lot of money, and not just the CEOs who watched large portions of their own stock holdings in their own companies vaporize. Let’s also not forget the chasm of broken trust that opened between the business community and the public.
So what happened? Did the CEOs transmogrify into greed-poisoned crooks? That answer may satisfy our human desire for a villain, but that is not exactly how things played out, says Anup Srivastava, an assistant professor of accounting information and management at the Kellogg School of Management.
Click Here to Read: Behavioral Motivations: When CEO’s Cook the Books & Why do firms issue financial misstatements?

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