The paper, coauthored with Stefano Cascino, Mark Clatworthy,  Joachim Gassen, and Shahed Imam, examines how investment professionals assess the usefulness of financial accounting information depending on their information acquisition objectives and preparers’ earnings management incentives. The authors conduct a survey experiment based on face-to-face interviews with investment professionals and document two main results. First, they find that, compared with investment professionals assigned a firm valuation objective, those assigned a managerial performance evaluation objective assess accounting information as significantly less useful. Second, they find no systematic evidence that preparers’ earnings management incentives negatively affect investment professionals’ assessments of accounting information usefulness. 

The full draft of the forthcoming paper is available at:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3008083