In asserting that the number of firms reporting small profits is abnormally high, thus suggesting that earnings management has taken place, accounting researchers assume that the distribution of reported earnings should be smooth for unmanaged earnings. This has never in fact been demonstrated. This article seeks to confirm this assumption through a laboratory experiment, and also sets out to i...

We test the effect of audit effort on earnings management using a unique database of hours worked by auditors on 9,738 audits in Greece between 1994 and 2002. When audit hours are lower, (1) abnormal accruals are more often positive than negative, (2) positive abnormal accruals are larger, and (3) companies are more likely to manage earnings upwards in order to meet or beat the zero earnings be...

This paper hypothesizes that earnings management in China’s listed companies is mainly induced by controlling owners’ tunneling activity. We conduct our analyses in two stages. In the first stage, we relate our analyses to prior research on Chinese listed companies which has documented their strong incentives to manage earnings in order to meet certain return on equity (ROE) thresholds. We iden...

We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers’ assessments of their firms’ business prospects are imperfect. Since managers’ imperfect business assessments influence both accruals generation and earnings projection, we hypothesize that management earnings forecasts exhi...

To investigate how the possibility of earnings manipulation affects managerial compensation contracts, we study a two period agency setting in which a firm’s manager can engage in “window dressing” activities to manipulate reported accounting earnings. Earnings manipulation boosts the reported earnings in one period at the expense of the reported earnings in the other period. We show that the p...

this paper analyzes the relationship between capital structure and earning management. for analyzing we use 119 non-financial companies that listed in tehran stock exchange from 2000 to 2008. the researchers will focus on comparing the jones model and the modified jones model, which are the two most frequently used model in empirical analysis nowadays. earnings management is a kind of managemen...

Recent empirical research has found that when a firm releases its earnings report earlier than expected, its stock price rises, on average, while if the report is late, its stock price declines. The analysis here focuses on two alternative explanations for these findings, each based on the premise that some firms with unfavorable earnings increase their reported income through earnings manageme...