The study objects for investigating the possibility of activating both audit committee and board of directors for restricting the practices of earnings management phenomenon. To achieve this objective, a questionnaire had been developed and self-administered for a selected sample consists of 123 auditors working in Jordan based on the simple random sampling method. The study first hypothesis is...

Analysts often provide forecasts of one-year ahead earnings, earnings two-year ahead, as well as long-term earnings growth rates. In our attempts to understand the properties of these contemporaneous multi-period earnings forecasts, we begin by examining whether analysts’ earnings forecasts can be described using the linear information dynamics (LID). We find that LID is an appropriate descript...

Dividends distribution of Chinese listed companies is irregular, and the level of dividends can’t match that of earnings persistence. This paper empirically investigates the relationship between dividends distribution, including payout policy and level of cash dividends, and earnings persistence. Different from current literature, this paper is the first to investigate the relationship between ...

In this paper, we use census tract data to analyse changes in neighbourhood income inequality and residential economic segregation in the eight largest Canadian cities during the 1980-95 period. Is the income gap between richer and poorer neighbourhoods rising? Are high and low-income families increasingly clustered in economically homogeneous neighbourhoods? The main results are an elaboration...

We examine whether the information content of earnings is inversely related to the degree of conformity between financial accounting income and taxable income. Our inquiry exploits a natural experiment first examined by Guenther et al. (1997) in which a set of U.S. firms were forced to increase their book-tax conformity as a result of a change in the tax law. We find evidence consistent with th...

Why do large positive earnings surprises occur? The literature often treats large earnings surprises as the exogenous event that precipitates subsequent stock price drift, but analyst expectations and earnings realizations are the result of conscious decisions made by analysts and managers. While neither analysts nor managers have an obvious incentive for an extreme deviation between expected a...

We analyze the financial statements of 58,653 firm-years from 34 countries for the period 1985-1998 to construct a panel data set measuring three dimensions of reported accounting earnings for each country – earnings aggressiveness, loss avoidance, and earnings smoothing. We hypothesize that these three dimensions are associated with uninformative or opaque earnings, and so we combine these thr...

This paper uses direct measures of literacy to examine the influence of cognitive and unobserved skills on earnings. We find that cognitive skills contribute significantly to earnings and that their inclusion in earnings equations reduces the measured impact of schooling. The impact of literacy on earnings does not vary across quantiles of the earnings distribution; schooling and literacy do no...