About

Matthew Bloomfield is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research primarily focuses on incentives, earnings management, and the interaction between product market considerations and accounting choices. He has received numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the Teaching Excellence Award from Wharton and the Excellence in Refereeing Award from The Journal of Accounting Research. Bloomfield earned his PhD in Accounting from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2018 and holds Bachelor's Degrees in Statistics and Music Performance from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, obtained in 2012.

Research topics

• Business
• Accounting
• Political Science
• Economics
• Computer Security
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Social psychology
• Microeconomics
• Psychology
• Industrial organization
• Finance
• Actuarial science
• Law

Selected publications

• Executive Incentives and Strategic Talent Acquisition: Evidence from Poaching

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Preemptive Disclosure

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Relative Performance Evaluation and Strategic Peer‐Harming Disclosures

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2024-05-02 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Many firms use relative stock performance to evaluate and incentivize their CEOs. We document that such firms routinely disclose information that harms their peers' stock prices, and sometimes explicitly mention the harmed peers, by name, in these disclosures. Consistent with deliberate sabotage, peer‐harming disclosures appear to be aimed at peers whose stock price depressions are most likely to benefit the disclosing firms' CEOs. The pricing effect of these disclosures does not reverse, suggesting that the disclosures contain legitimate information regarding peers' prospects. In sum, our results suggest that relative performance evaluation in CEO pay motivates CEOs to internalize the externalities of their disclosures, and strategically disclose information that harms peers' stock prices, in order to improve their firms' relative standing within their peer group.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Drivers of Public Opinion on the Acceptability of Distorting Performance Measures

  The Accounting Review · 2024-10-25 · 2 citations

  article

  ABSTRACT Agents often inflate measured performance by distorting operating decisions (e.g., real earnings management) and/or reporting decisions (e.g., accruals management). Across four studies, we find that public judgments of distortion’s acceptability largely reflect assessments of how harmful and norm-violating the distortion is. Judgments of operating distortion primarily reflect assessments of harm, whereas judgments of reporting distortion primarily reflect assessments of norm violation. These results are consistent with the Theory of Dyadic Morality (Gray, Waytz, and Young 2012; Schein and Gray 2018). We also find that those who perceive an accounting system as more unfairly withholding an agent’s bonus assess distortion (especially reporting distortion) to be less norm-violating. Those who perceive the performance measure as less appropriate for capturing the value of performance to stakeholders assess distortion (especially operating distortion) to be more harmful. Assessments of distortions’ harm and norm violation explain a substantial portion of the variation in acceptability judgments.

  PublisherDOI

• Relative performance evaluation, sabotage and collusion

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2023 · 38 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Security
  • Business
  • Industrial organization
  PublisherDOI

• Common Ownership, Executive Compensation, and Product Market Competition

  The Accounting Review · 2023-09-11 · 24 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The negative effects of common ownership on competition have received significant attention, but many proposed mechanisms for institutional investor influence seem implausible. We develop and test an analytical model of optimal compensation in an oligopoly with common ownership, focusing on revenue-based pay as a plausible channel through which institutional investors might influence competition. Our model implies a negative effect of common ownership on firms’ use of revenue-based pay. Using both associative analyses and an event study difference-in-differences design based on plausibly exogenous institutional mergers, we find no evidence of a negative relation between common ownership and the use of revenue-based pay, except in an economically small subsample of extremely concentrated owners. Results involving relative performance incentives are similar. Collectively, our results provide no support for the notion that cross-owning blockholders in general influence compensation contracts in order to soften executives’ incentives to compete aggressively. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: D43; G30; L13; M12; M40; M52.

  PublisherDOI

• Performance Pay Plans, Power and Product Prices

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2021 Excellence in Refereeing

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2022 · 1 citations

  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Accounting
  DOI

• The Asymmetric Effect of Reporting Flexibility on Priced Risk

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2021-01-21 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Most firms covary more positively with downmarkets than upmarkets—a phenomenon I refer to as “risk asymmetry.” I predict and find that risk asymmetry is caused, at least in part, by a firm's ability to selectively obfuscate poor performance. Risk asymmetry decreases significantly when firms are required to adhere to the more stringent auditing standards mandated under Section 404 of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act, however this decrease is more muted for firms with weak internal controls. Consistent with my predictions, these patterns are stronger for more market‐sensitive firms and weaker for firms that include relative performance evaluation in their CEOs' pay packages. Taken together with prior literature (which documents that risk asymmetry is priced), my results suggest that a firm can lower its cost of capital by credibly reducing its ability to obfuscate value‐relevant information.

  PublisherDOI

• Compensation disclosures and strategic commitment: Evidence from revenue-based pay

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2021 · 71 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Business
  • Microeconomics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pavel Matousek

  University of Exeter

  41 shared

• David Littlejohn

  University of Strathclyde

  25 shared

• Neil Everall

  Intertek (Canada)

  25 shared

• Alison Nordon

  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

  25 shared

• Christian Leuz

  13 shared

• Robert J. Bloomfield

  Cornell University

  7 shared

• Tamara A. Lambert

  Lehigh University

  6 shared

• P. W. Loeffen

  Cobalt Institute

  6 shared

Education

• PhD, Accounting

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• Excellence in Refereeing Award, The Journal of Accounting Re…
• Glen McLaughlin Prize for Research in Accounting Ethics (202…
• Teaching Excellence Award, The Wharton School (2023)
• Outstanding Reviewer Award, The Accounting Review (2023)
• Excellence in Refereeing Award, The Journal of Accounting Re…