Benford's Law, which is the law of digit distributions, is widely applied to study fraud or bias in a data set. In this paper, we applied Benford's Law to examine the first digits of financial statement items of UK listed companies. The evidence shows that the first digits conform to Benford's...

This paper constructs a signal-based composite index, namely ESCORE, which captures the context of earnings management. Specifically, ESCORE aggregates 15 individual signals related to earnings management based on prior relevant literature. Empirical results using UK data shows that when ESCORE...

Previous research suggests that share-financed acquirers inflate their earnings before merger and acquisition announcements. The existing literature also indicates that characteristics of chief executive officers (CEO) could affect earnings management. In this study, we extend prior studies by...

This paper constructs a signal-based composite index, namely ESCORE, which captures the context of earnings management. Specifically, ESCORE aggregates 15 individual signals related to both accrual and real earnings management based on prior relevant literature. After establishing that ESCORE is...