This study investigates how discretionary accruals affect earnings valuation (or price-earnings multiples) to provide indirect evidence on whether managers use their discretion over accruals to communicate their private information or to obtain private benefits. The results indicate that...

We provide evidence on the effects of corporate lobbying on earnings management (EM). We argue that corporate lobbying provides firms with some degree of political protection from enforcement of laws and regulations. Thus, lobbying firms face a lower threat of enforcement which in turn reduces...

Prior studies suggest that equity incentives inherently have both an interest alignment effect and an opportunistic financial reporting effect. Using three distinct proxies for earnings management we find evidence consistent with the incentive alignment (opportunistic financial reporting) effect...

Overconfident managers overestimate future returns from their firms' investments. Thus, we predict that overconfident managers will tend to delay loss recognition and generally use less conservative accounting. Furthermore, we test whether external monitoring helps to mitigate this effect. Using...

Watts (2003), among others, argues that conservatism helps in corporate governance by mitigating agency problems associated with managers' investment decisions. We hypothesize that if conservatism reduces managers' ex ante incentives to take on negative NPV projects and improves the ex post...