We examine whether firms with managers that have prior internal audit experience are less likely to manage earnings. We find that firms with managers that have internal audit experience are associated with less overall earnings management, driven by lower real earnings management. Importantly,...

This study investigates whether culture in general and religion in particular mitigate earnings management. Using a cross-country data set, empirical tests based on rank regressions indicate that earnings management is unrelated to both religious affiliation and the degree of religiosity. In...

Following the international effort of strengthening corporate governance, this study investigates the impact of Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendation (ASX 2009) on the credibility of accounting information. By using 138 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), this...

Starting in mid-2014, oil prices began to fall drastically, hereafter this is referred to as the oil price crisis. This paper investigates the impacts of this crisis on earnings management behaviour in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Earnings management is measured in terms of accrual...

This paper provides empirical evidence that Croatian companies manage reported earnings to avoid losses and earnings declines. Specifically, we find that the cross-sectional distribution of scaled earnings and changes in earnings show high frequencies of small positive earnings and small...

Sections 302 and 404 of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act require firms to disclose material weaknesses (MWs) in internal controls. We investigate the association of single and multiple instances of MWs with earnings management. Multiple instances are positively associated with earnings management for...

We examine the relation between passive ownership and financial reporting quality measured by Beneish's (1999) earnings' manipulation score (M-score). We find that passive ownership is negatively related to M-score and to the likelihood of being designated as a “manipulator” firm. However,...

In this study, we dispel several popular notions regarding the meeting or beating expectations/thresholds (MBE) phenomenon that permeates the research design of many empirical papers. First, MBE is not unequivocally associated with aggressive earnings management. Second, MBE does not necessarily...

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 test whether earnings management (like a virus) spreads from firm to firm via board connections of shared directors (virus carriers). We use earnings restatements to identify firms that managed earnings and to identify the period when these firms manipulated earnings. We consider firms as...