This paper documents a differential role of R&D versus SG&A for real earnings management. The distinction of these two components is important because prior studies mostly examine their combined use, but firms could manipulate them differently given the differing valuation implications: reduced...

This study investigates the effect of real earnings management on two important aspects of earnings quality: earnings persistence and its informativeness about future cash flows. I focus on real earnings management through the abnormal reduction in discretionary expenditures and investigate how...

We examine the impact of conditional conservatism on earnings management. Our findings support the view that conditional conservatism reduces accruals-based earnings management but also triggers a trade-off between accruals and real earnings management. Notwithstanding this trade-off, we show...

We examine the effect of auditor conservatism on corporate innovation. We hypothesize that, because conservative auditors constrain income-increasing accounting discretion, managers may sacrifice long-term investments in innovation to boost current earnings and meet short-term performance...

Previous literature on earnings management has examined the maintained hypothesis that firms barely beating earnings benchmarks are earnings manipulators with earnings before accounting manipulation otherwise slightly below their benchmarks and has implemented research designs that treat all...

This paper studies the optimal design of long-term executive pay plans when boards of directors use accounting information for investment decision-making and executives can take costly actions to manipulate this information. The model predicts that a shift to more convex executive pay plans,...

We examine how compensation of chief executive officer (CEO) and corporate governance practices affect earnings management behavior in an emerging economy, Pakistan. Using 1836 firm-year observations from 260 firms listed in KSE for period 2005 to 2012, we do not find that CEO compensation has...

We use highly granular computational linguistics to assess the MD&A section of the 10-K as a whole. Our results show that the content of MD&A can be systematically used to explain the valuation of firms, particularly those undergoing business change, where the value relevance of financial...

We develop a model to analyze how board governance affects firms' financial reporting choices, and managers' incentives to manipulate accounting reports. In our setting, ceteris paribus, conservative accounting is desirable because it allows the board of directors to better oversee the firm's...

We assess the role of both accruals manipulation (AM) and real activities manipulation (RAM) in inducing overvaluation at the time of a seasoned equity offering (SEO). Our results reveal that earnings management is most consistently and predictably linked with post-SEO stock market...