Purpose Charting the earnings numbers reported by Korean firms produces a bell curve, but for a sharp discontinuity in the area surrounding zero. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if and how a large segment of Korean managers might manage accounting numbers to produce the observed...

We expect that tax expenses will provide a last opportunity to meet an earnings target, and involve the complexity and discretion necessary for information asymmetry to persist. Hence, tax expenses are powerful settings to examine earnings management among a wide range of firms. Considering this...