The variability of accounting accruals provides a measure of the normal level of managers' accounting discretion and has important implications for event studies of earnings management. We examine how this measure is related to the economic factors including both firm characteristics and...

Earnings management is a key issue for financial reporting. The purpose of this paper is to derive a set of indices to measure the pervasiveness of earnings management (PEM) using the properties of quarterly accrual volatility. The PEM index can be viewed as a quality measure of financial...

We study the relationship between the amount of managed earnings and firms' earnings performance and expected growth in a reporting model, where managers manipulate earnings to influence the valuation of firms' equity while bearing a cost that is increasing and convex in the amount of managed...