The Belgian Corporate Governance Code was published in 2004 and updated in 2009 to provide standards of good practice. Since 2008, Belgian law has imposed the creation of an audit committee for all listed firms. There are many published, empirical studies that focus on the relationship between...

Following Zhang (Accounting Review, 2007) we cast firm accruals in terms of short-term investment. Since many studies consider accruals as a smoothed measure of cash flows, we first adopt Zhang specification and augment the standard Jones model with a cash-flow variable. Second, if accruals are...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether independent directors and audit committees that are chaired by an independent director as required by the Jakarta Stock Exchange (JSX) affect the quality of reported earnings. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses both...

This study examines the rarely investigated association between institutional ownership and income smoothing. The results support the predicted positive association between institutional ownership and the likelihood of firms smoothing earnings towards their earnings trend in general. However,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of audit quality on the market pricing of earnings and earnings components in China. Design/methodology/approach –The paper measures audit quality using three tiers of audit firm designation, namely International Big 4 audit...

We examine how the criteria for choosing estimation samples affect the ability to detect discretionary accruals, using several variants of the Jones (1991) model. Researchers commonly estimate accruals models in cross-section, and define the estimation sample as all firms in the same industry....

This paper investigates the impact of outside directors’ and auditors’ monetary incentives on the association between discretionary accounting and managers’ cash bonuses in a two-tier system. For a sample of German stock corporations from 2005 to 2007 we expect and find that outside...

This paper examines the association between institutional ownership and the earnings management beha- vior of some French absorbing firms. Using a sample of 76 French mergers and absorptions concluded over the period ranging from 2000 to 2010, we undertake to present some empirical evidence...

Purpose – This study aims to examine the combined effect of audit committee existence and external audit on earnings management. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses ordinary least squares regression model to examine the effect of audit committee existence, external audit and the...