Earnings management and financial distress or soundness determining CEOs’ future over- and under-investment decisions

Investment and Financial Decisions under Uncertainty and Exogenous Borrowing Rate

A competitive firm which chooses the timing of investment and optimal volume of debt is considered. The price of the firm’s output follows the geometric Brownian motion or more general jump-diffusion processes, and the firm takes an arbitrage free borrowing rate as given. The optimal timing of investment and volume of debt is computed, and it is shown that if the borrowing rate is close to the ...

Technical Default, Auditors' Decisions and Future Financial Distress

Earnings Quality Based on Corporate Investment Decisions

In this paper, I examine a new approach for measuring earnings quality, defined as the closeness of reported earnings to “permanent earnings,” based on firm decisions with regard to capital and labor investments. Specifically, I measure earnings quality as the contemporaneous association between changes in the levels of capital and labor investment and the change in reported earnings. This appr...

Earnings Management with Accruals and Financial Engineering

When a business suffers from unsuccessful competitive strategies, poor products, or pricing disadvantages, it generally tends to suffer a steady erosion of corporate value and credit quality, but no abrupt death. By contrast, revelation of large-scale earnings manipulation usually results in a quick and abrupt failure of the corporation, often in a span of just weeks or months. Thus the sudden ...

Economic Growth, Over-investment, and Financial Crisis