Prior literature studying railway accounting during the 19th and 20th centuries defends the thesis of lack of reliability of accounting figures. This prior research, which mainly studies the cases of the United Kingdom and the United States, offers mixed views on the causes, or simply accepts...

We examine the role of accounting conservatism in alleviating the agency problems of overvalued equity. We predict that by imposing asymmetric timeliness of good versus bad news reporting, conservatism limits the incidence of earnings expectation games. According to Jensen (2005), these games...

Managers use management accounting and control systems (MACS) to monitor and detect deviations from earnings targets. We examine an unexplored side of MACS: its effects on earnings management. We predict and find evidence that managers interactively use MACS to focus the attention of the whole...

We predict that accounting conservatism influences insiders' opportunities to speculate on good and bad news, and thus, insider trading profitability. We find that greater conditional (unconditional) conservatism is associated with lower (higher) insiders' profitability from sales. We find...