Prior studies suggest that equity incentives inherently have both an interest alignment effect and an opportunistic financial reporting effect. Using three distinct proxies for earnings management we find evidence consistent with the incentive alignment (opportunistic financial reporting) effect...

This study examines the role of earnings management in the relationship between firm performance and capital structure, dividing earnings management into discretionary and nondiscretionary accruals to test established theories on the capital structure. Using data on 802 companies in the member...

There is hardly any evidence on earnings properties of co-operatives for which profit maximisation is not a primary goal. We find that cooperatives in Germany exhibit higher levels of timely loss recognition when they have more members(owners), when they pursue charitable objectives, and when...

​Prior studies of real-activity earnings management (REM) focus on earnings-inflating abnormal activities. We seek to establish the existence of downward REM by investigating several corporate events in which managers have incentives to temporarily deflate market valuations. Specifically, we...

We investigate the interplay between creditor financing and the smoothness of earnings reported by European private firms and document how heterogeneous debt-contracting infrastructures across Europe moderate this relation. Most European private firms are owner-manager run enterprises with...

In this paper, we illuminate the importance of accounting conservatism adjustments when estimating the implied cost of capital (ICC) with the Residual Income Valuation (RIV) and the Abnormal Earnings Growth (AEG) model. Specifically, we adjust for three main limitations in the research of ICC,...

Corporate governance literature advances the idea that certain aspects of board of directors' structure improve monitoring of managerial decisions. Among these is the managers' decision to manage earnings. Prior studies have shown that earnings management, in widely-held public companies, is...

Concentrated ownership of large listed companies is widespread throughout the world, and Germany is typical in this respect. This paper proposes a method of distinguishing empirically between the beneficial and harmful effects of ownership concentration, and applies it to German data. The...