Enron's collapse is generally viewed as a morality tale - the natural result of managerial greed, a clueless board, and feckless gatekeepers. But none of these aspects of the story clearly distinguishes Enron from other major firms during the bubble era of the late 90s. This material identifies...

This paper develops a simple model to examine the dynamic relationship between earnings management and accounting regulations. In this model, current accrual-based earnings management affects the tightness of future regulations and managers rationally choose the levels of both accrual-based and...

Khan and Watts (2009) develop a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism, labeled C_Score, that builds on the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) measure. However, recent research documents an asymmetric relation between lagged earnings and current returns, indicative of bias in the Basu...

Objective - The purpose of this research is to obtain empirical research on the effect of corporate governance on earnings management in distressed and non-distressed companies. Corporate governance in this research is measured by independent board, audit committee, board of commissioners,...

I study whether managers use real activities manipulation and accrual-based earnings management as substitutes in managing earnings. I find that managers trade off the two earnings management methods based on their relative costs and that managers adjust the level of accrual-based earnings...

This study examines the association between real earnings management, governance attributes, and IPO failure risk. Using a sample of 4174 IPOs firms that went public over the period of 1998-2011, we find evidence that real earnings management and governance attributes are associated with IPO...

This paper takes advantage of a regulation in Europe that allows member states to prescribe lighter reporting requirements for smaller unlisted firms. Under this framework firm size is measured using three variables – total assets, revenues, and number of employees – over which firms have...

Based on signal theory and legitimacy theory, this paper examines whether firms with financial reporting misstatements (restatements) would prefer conservative financial reporting to send signals regarding their determinants of improving financial reporting credibility and legitimate...

We investigate changes in financial reporting conservatism arising from disclosure-related shareholder lawsuits filed between 1996 and 2016. We find that sued firms respond to 10b-5 litigation with increased accounting conservatism. Consistent with a spillover effect, we also find that non-sued...

Performance-based pay is an important instrument to align the interests of managers with the interests of shareholders. However, recent evidence suggests that high-powered incentives also provide managers with incentives to manipulate the firm's reported earnings. The previous literature has...