Purpose With Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), the self-regulation of the auditing profession was replaced with standard setting and oversight by the government. The authors focus on the audit fees literature to examine how this change impacted research trends over time and shaped different...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper was to investigate the motivation behind whistleblowing, the tussle between internal and external whistleblowing and the extent whistleblowing laws in the UK and the USA are able to provide protection to whistleblowers. While employees need to be protected...

Purpose – Managers generally have discretion in determining how components of earnings are presented in financial statements in distinguishing between “normal” earnings and items classified as unusual, special, significant, exceptional or abnormal. Prior research has found that such...

Purpose This paper aims to examine whether firms in the decline stage of lifecycle manipulate core or operating income through misclassification of operating expenses as income-decreasing special items. Design/methodology/approach The sample comprises of firms from an emerging market, India with...

Purpose This paper aims to examine whether financially distressed firms manipulate core or operating income through the misclassification of operating expenses as income-decreasing special items. Design/methodology/approach This sample comprises firms in the USA with data from 1989 to 2010. The...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explain the adjustment rate made to target capital structures by listed non-financial firms in Pakistan during the courses of their life cycles and to determine what factors influence their adjustment rates. Design/methodology/approach The study used...

Purpose Higher real earnings management (REM) reduces financial reporting quality and increases the uncertainty of future cash flows and profitability among investors. This study asserts that REM-induced noise increases idiosyncratic return volatility (IVOL), aims to examine the association...

Forecasting future period profitability is widely identified as an aim of financial statement analysis, and these forecasts are typically relied upon for the estimation of firm value. To facilitate this, the decomposition of earnings into its components or drivers, is typically advocated. This...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to replicate Richardson et al. ’s (2005) study on how accrual components’ reliability affects earnings persistence and whether investors anticipate the lower earnings persistence through stock return. In this study, the authors use more recent data to...