This paper examines the differences in accrual-based and real earnings management across countries from the perspective of investor protection. Following prior research (Leuz et al., 2003), we hypothesize that accrual-based earnings management is more constrained by strict discipline in countries with stronger investor protection. For real earnings management in countries with stronger investor...

This paper estimates the impact of three types of qualitative differences in college experiences on the earnings of recent college graduates-college major, school quality and educational performance. The analysis is based on a new statistical technique, known as hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which distinguishes more precisely between the effects of individual factors and institutional fac...

Increasing income and wealth inequality has led to renewed interest in understanding and explaining wealth and income distributions, and in particular the recent growth in their top shares (Piketty, 2014). The literature has largely emphasized the role of earnings inequality in explaining wealth inequality. Indeed, Bewley-Aiyagari economies, which focus on precautionary savings as an optimal re...

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the impact of college quality and academic major on the earnings of a nationally representative sample of baccalaureate recipients. We extend previous work in this area by analyzing the magnitude of change in the influence of these factors at two points in the early career of these graduates. Our results demonstrate that, despite significant variation, graduates fr...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper examines the influence of ownership structure on earnings quality of firms listed on the Chinese Stock Exchanges. We empirically test four contemporary earnings quality measures, including volatility of earnings, variability of earnings over cash flows, correlations between accruals and cash flows, and level of discretionary accruals, for 1438 firms listed on Sh...

Despite the large number of papers purporting to identify earnings management, the current techniques used to identify it are sorely lacking. In general, they are based on the assumption that accruals unexplained by a linear projection on firm-level observables (i.e., discretionary accruals) represent either explicit earnings management or poor quality earnings.1 Namely, these techniques assume...

The singular focus of public debate on the "top 1 percent" of households overlooks the component of earnings inequality that is arguably most consequential for the "other 99 percent" of citizens: the dramatic growth in the wage premium associated with higher education and cognitive ability. This Review documents the central role of both the supply and demand for skills in shaping inequality, di...

As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings an...

Increases in the association between spouses' earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high-earning or two low-earning partners. This article uses log-linear models and data from the March Current Population Survey to describe trends in the association between spouses' earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality amon...