Financial managers intentionally use the legal manipulation of earnings to the business development. Earnings management is a widespread business finance phenomenon. The approaches and the ways of this practice are marked by many parallels. The main target of the article is to show the clusters...

A widely cited paper, Cohen, Dey, and Lys (2008, hereinafter CDL), examines accrual (AEM) and real earnings management (REM) pre- and post-Sarbanes Oxley and provides evidence that, in the period immediately following SOX, accruals management declined and was substituted by REM. We re-visit CDL...

Deferred tax and accruals have the characteristic of causing reported earnings to be above or below normal. Both are permitted to be used by companies in financial reporting. This study examines whether large deferred taxes and large accruals have an impact on the relationship between earnings...

This paper investigates whether corporate social responsibility active (CSR active) firms operate dissimilarly from other firms in their financial reporting. Specifically, we examine whether the corporate social responsibility (CSR) attitude of a firm sways its reporting incentives, in respect...

Studies on the characteristics of insolvent firms' earnings management are critical, as the ripple effects of a firm's opportunistic accounting and insolvency on society can be widespread and significant. This study divides a dataset of unlisted firms into four groups (large firms that have...

This study explores the relationship between company earnings management and the relative value relevance of book value and earnings. The differential effect on the value relevance of earnings management (EM) from 2014 to 2018 for all firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) is...

This paper explores the manner in which Dutch and German listed companies were able to manage earnings by the decline in corporate income tax toward the end of the 2000s. In addition, a recent article examines the existing state of earnings management at a European level in the Netherlands and...

Earnings announcements present a clear risk to investors and, under rational asset pricing theory, such risk should be consistently priced in stocks. However, we find that stocks with high earnings announcement risk earn significantly higher returns only during months when firms have earnings or...

Because stock liquidity should improve managers’ access to external information, we examine whether managers of firms with higher stock liquidity form more accurate accrual estimates. Consistent with our expectations, we find that accrual estimation errors of firms with more liquid stocks are...

Corporate income tax (CIT), as an important economic instrument in most jurisdictions, constitutes a significant portion of financial costs in business operations. It is known that the structure of tax function, accounting method and loss carryover policy have significant impacts on a firm's...

This paper investigates specific risk in emerging market. Emerging markets are accumulating capital at a faster rate than developed markets but they lag far behind developed markets. Risk is one of the main factors that investors consider when making investments.Risk contained in Financial...

The aim of this study is to understand whether real earnings management (REM) and accruals earnings management (AM) can be used as substitute of one another in the context of Pakistan. Additionally, we also examine the effect of country-level political risk on earnings management. To achieve our...

A large body of empirical research in accounting investigates the causes and consequences of accruals quality, reaching numerous influential conclusions. Yet little work has been done to systematically evaluate the validity of the underlying measures of accruals quality. We evaluate these...

There are several explanations for why accruals persist into earnings at lower rates than cash flows. These include that accruals contain estimation error, diminishing returns to investment, and product-markets shocks. We predict that the mixed attribute GAAP measurement model along with the...

This study examines the interaction of audit firm characteristics with two core earnings management tools: classification shifting (CS) and core accruals management (CACM). CS occurs when management intentionally misclassifies recurring operational expenses as special items to inflate...

This paper reconciles conflicting evidence in prior literature on the relative ability of earnings and cash flows in predicting future cash flows. Further, we investigate the implications of temporal shifts in accrual properties and operating environment for cash flow predictability. Three key...

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...

This study examines whether the number of estimates in the qualitative portions of a firm's Notes to the Financial Statements (hereafter footnotes) is informative about the relation between accruals and future earnings. We measure the number of estimates using the frequency of the use of the...

We propose new multifactor models to explain the accruals anomaly. Our baseline model represents an application of Merton's ICAPM, in which the key factors represent (innovations on) the term and small-value spreads. The model shows large explanatory power for cross-sectional risk premia...

It is well documented that accounting measures of investment, such as working capital and capital expenditures, negatively predict future stock returns. The earnings fixation hypothesis suggests that investors overestimate and overvalue the persistence of the accrual component of earnings....

Considerable research has been devoted to the evaluation of accrual accounting, with an accrual-cash flow relation at the center of the investigation. However, much of the research is based on misconceptions. First, accruals are defined as changes in balance sheet items, but these are not the...

Previous research has shown that costs exhibit a sticky behavior: Costs increases when sales rise are larger than cost decreases when sales drop. Given that the traditional accrual models rely on the assumption of costs responding equally to sales increases and to sales decreases, the sticky...

Recent work shows that the role of accrual accounting in mitigating the timing differences between cash flows and operating performance has been disappearing over time (Bushman, Lerman, and Zhang 2016). We argue that even though there is noise in the accrual accounting process, sophisticated...

This paper investigates accrual earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM) in family businesses (FB) in Saudi Arabia. Current literature indicates that minority rights are confiscated by the controlling shareholders in a business environment weak to protect investors. Based on...

The transition from cash to accrual accounting is said to change a government's perception of its budget quite fundamentally. Although an exorbitant number of governments have reformed the mode of accounting at high costs in past years, reliable empirical evidence of consequences on their...

The present paper aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of shareholder activism on earnings management. Specifically, it is focused on investigating the moderating role of an external governance mechanism such as external audit quality. Based on a sample of French companies...

Purpose: This research aimed to analyse the effect of top management support, training and communication on the implementation of accrual accounting. Design/methodology/approach: The hypotheses of the study were tested using the survey data from 63 working unit in Cianjur Regency. The instrument...

This paper examined whether financial statement comparability constrains opportunistic earningsmanagement in frontiermarket countries. Using a large sample of 19 frontiermarket countries, and an accounting comparabilitymethod thatmaps comparability across several accounting standards, the...

The aim of the paper is to assess the effect of discretionary accruals on firm growth while controlling for firm characteristics and macroeconomic environment. Employing a large sample of 1.105 young and high-growth firms (gazelles) from 15 emerging European countries over the period 2006-2014,...

This paper finds that the initiation of trading in credit default swaps (CDS) improves earnings quality by reducing absolute abnormal earnings accruals through specific channels in CDS firms. CDS initiation brought about more private information discovery via financial analysts, cross-market...

We investigate the association between managerial ability and revenue-expense matching. We find that firms having managers with better ability exhibit better contemporaneous revenue-expense matching because more capable managers estimate accruals more accurately and select the projects with...

Prior research finds evidence suggesting a long-term trend of declining accruals quality in the U.S. Using the Dechow and Dichev (2002) accruals quality measure, we provide new evidence that this decline began to reverse around 2000, with accruals quality generally improving through 2016. We...

Managers appear to inflate non-investment accruals and then adjust financing decisions to capitalize on such inflation. Using a large sample of corporate seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) for the period 1972 - 2017, we find that firms which adjust non-investment accruals to inflate pre-issue...

Extant research on the accruals anomaly is based on returns starting a few months after fiscal year ends, not when accruals are publicly known. We explore the nature of the accruals anomaly by analyzing the speed of price adjustment to accruals information from the date when accruals first...

We provide an applied introduction to Bayesian estimation methods for empirical accounting research. To showcase the methods, we compare and contrast the estimation of accruals models via a Bayesian approach with the literature's standard approach. The standard approach takes a given model of...