We examine the sophistication of analysts' cash flow forecasts to better understand what accrual adjustments, if any, analysts make when forecasting cash flows. As a preliminary step, we first demonstrate that prior empirical tests used to evaluate the sophistication of analysts' cash flow...

The purpose of our study is to further understand managerial incentives that affect the volatility of reported fiscal-year earnings. We do this by examining income smoothing based on pseudo fiscal years. For each firm, we create pseudo-year earnings using four consecutive quarters other than the...

This study investigates the impact of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on accrual reliability (Richardson et al. 2005). Using a large sample of Australian firm years drawn from before and after the mandatory adoption of IFRS, we find that accrual...

Motivated by recent practitioners' concerns that short-term earnings guidance leads to managerial myopia, we investigate the impact of short-term earnings guidance on earnings management. Using a propensity-score matched control sample, we find strong and consistent evidence that the issuance of...

This paper finds that the initiation of trading in credit default swaps (CDS) improves earnings quality by reducing absolute abnormal earnings accruals through specific channels in CDS firms. CDS initiation brought about more private information discovery via financial analysts, cross-market...

We examine the relationship between customer and supplier firms' abnormal accruals. We propose “earnings management” hypothesis and “customer demand shock” hypothesis. We find that customer firms' demand shocks link customer and supplier abnormal accruals as they propagate along the...

Prior literature finds that short selling is beneficial to the market because it increases liquidity and helps to discipline optimistic market prices. In this paper we use two controlled experiments to examine the potential for an unintended consequence of allowing short selling or easing short...

Recent work shows that the role of accrual accounting in mitigating the timing differences between cash flows and operating performance has been disappearing over time (Bushman, Lerman, and Zhang 2016). We argue that even though there is noise in the accrual accounting process, sophisticated...

Prior research shows that a greater level of cumulative accrual earnings management (AEM) over prior periods limits managers' ability to use AEM in the current period and has suggested that this constraint on AEM is associated with greater use of real earnings management (REM). First, we confirm...

Managers are often employed many alternatives for earnings management following their objectives or the financial reporting objectives; the commonly used are the accrual-based and cash-based earnings management. The literature reveals that managers adopt the two strategies in different ways,...