We find that managers with military experience pursue less tax avoidance than other managers and pay an estimated $1–$2 million more in corporate taxes per firm-year. These managers also undertake less aggressive tax planning strategies with smaller tax reserves and fewer tax havens. Although...

Does earnings management, even though legal, hinder investor trust in reported earnings? Or do investors regard earnings management as a way for firms to convey private information, or simply as a neutral feature of financial reporting? We find that past abstinence from earnings management...

Researchers have used various measures as indications of "earnings quality" including persistence, accruals, smoothness, timeliness, loss avoidance, investor responsiveness, and external indicators such as restatements and SEC enforcement releases. For each measure, we discuss causes of...

In this paper, we offer a new theory for the economic demand of accounting conservatism, which emphasizes the signaling role of conservatism in a debt market with asymmetric information. In our model, accounting conservatism serves as a signal by which the borrower firm can convey their private...

We examine the effect of product market competition on firms' earnings management practices. Using exogenous variation in import competition, we find that heightened competition reduces both accrual-based and real earnings management. We also show that several measures of competition from past...

The current study investigates how board gender diversity moderates the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms (CG) and earnings management (EM) practices of firms in sub-Saharan Africa. The study samples annual reports and financial statements of 52 firms from nine sub-Saharan...

We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

We define accrual duration as the length of time between an accrual and its associated cash flow. Accrual duration and accrual discretion are inextricably linked by the fundamentals of the accrual process because one side of an accrual pair is pinned down by the sign and magnitude of its...

In this paper, we rely on an exogenous shock to examine the impact of litigation risk on real earnings management (REM). We conduct differences-in-differences tests centered on an unanticipated court ruling that reduced litigation risk for firms headquartered in the Ninth Circuit. REM increases...