A significant amount of earnings management (EM) research has treated managers' EM decision processes as a “black box”. The objective of this study is to begin to open the black box though examining the relative importance of economic factors as well as ethical considerations in managers' EM...

Using a sample of dividend-paying firms, we show that much of the variation in accruals and real activities can be explained by firms' different performance trajectories. High (low) performance firms spend more (less) on SG&A and CAPEX and hold what appear to be abnormally low (high) levels of...