1. Introduction
Earnings-based bonus schemes are a popular means of rewarding corporate
executives. Fox (1980) reports that in 1980 ninety percent of the one thousand
largest U.S. manufacturing corporations used a bonus plan based on accounting
earnings to remunerate managers. This paper tests the association between
managers' accrual and accounting procedure decisions and their income reporting
incentives under these plans. Earlier studies testing this relation
postulate that executives rewarded by bonus schemes select income-increasing
accounting procedures to maximize their bonus compensation. 1 Their empirical
results are conflicting. These tests, however, have several problems.
First, they ignore the earnings' definitions of the plans; earnings are often
defined so that certain accounting decisions do not affect bonuses. For exam-