We study labor unions, an important stakeholder group that has not been a focus of the earnings smoothing literature. We posit that managers strike a balance between sheltering resources from employees’ profit sharing demands and catering to employees’ aversion to downside risk by smoothing...

I contribute to the extensive earnings management literature by examining the effect of market competition on the relationship between managerial ability and earnings management. The results show that in the face of increased competition, high quality managers manipulate earnings via accruals...

Many existing earnings management studies establish earnings management detection criteria by examining the statements of every organization under review for a significant period of time. While being suitable for the academia, this approach cannot be adopted by the practitioners, who do not have...

Using C-Score, which is a firm-year measure of earnings conservatism developed by Khan and Watts (2009), this study examines the effect of directors' and officers' liability (D&O) insurance on earnings conservatism, and explores whether the increased litigation risk caused by firm's...

This study evaluates whether dual holdings report less conservatively than non-dual holdings. We define dual holdings as firms who have at least one shareholder who is a creditor simultaneously and hypothesize that this governance structure mitigates information asymmetries and therefore the...

Khan and Watts (2009) develop a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism, labeled C_Score, that builds on the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) measure. However, recent research documents an asymmetric relation between lagged earnings and current returns, indicative of bias in the Basu...

Following Cohen and Zarowin (2010), this study examines management's choices between alternative earnings management mechanisms applied to a specific corporate finance event. Specifically, this study examines the tradeoff between accrual-based earnings management (AEM) and real activities...

This paper examines the asset write-off behavior of loss firms in response to tax rule changes. In particular, we investigate two simultaneous changes in tax loss carryforward offsetting in opposite directions in Germany and France. Understanding if and how tax losses affect firms’ financial...

The empirical literature often theorizes that managerial overconfidence exacerbates earnings management because overconfidence sends the manager ``down the slippery slope to misreporting". In a principal-agent model with moral hazard, I show that overconfidence only increases the manager's...

This paper studies the impact of tightening accounting standards on an impatient manager's long-term investment decisions under earnings based performance evaluation. We analyze how the manager's possibility to influence current earnings will affect his investment decision-making. We examine a...