This paper examines whether dividend policy is associated with earnings management and whether the relationship varies across countries with wide-ranging degrees of institutional strength and transparency. Based on a sample of 23,429 corporations from 29 countries, we show that dividend payers...

This paper discusses some limitations of discretionary accruals measures. While discretionary accruals are acknowledged to be noisy proxies for earnings management, they are still widely used in the literature. This paper attempts to explain from basic econometrics how discretionary accruals are...

We examine the hierarchy of earnings benchmarks in Australia. Our results demonstrate a disconnect between the actions managers appear to take, and the market reaction to firms exceeding or just missing earnings benchmarks. The actions of managers appear consistent with them acting in a manner...

We revisit the asymmetric timeliness of earnings as proposed by Basu (1997). For a large sample of US firm years from 1970-2019, we show that earnings are asymmetrically timely with respect to bad economic news, and that this is robust to the declining timeliness of good news, different time...

This study develops a theory that predicts the lower the degree to which firms' earnings are correlated with the industry the greater the probability a firm will issue a biased signal of firm performance. The theory provides for causal predictions in our empirical tests in which we examine the...