We examine how biased financial reports (managed earnings) affect product market competition and how product market competition affects incentives to bias financial reports in a model with fully rational firms. We find that Cournot competitors bias their reports to create the impression that...

An accounting-based earnings manipulation detection model has strong out-of-sample power to predict cross-sectional returns. Companies with a higher probability of manipulation (M-score) earn lower returns on every decile portfolio sorted by size, book-to-market, momentum, accruals, and short...