Using income smoothing and its two components – the informational component and the garbled component – we examine whether and how the time-oriented tendency embedded in languages influences corporate financial reporting decisions. Separating languages into weak- versus strong- future time...

​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...

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...

I find that managers manage earnings upward in the quarters preceding a debt-covenant violation, but downward in the quarter a violation occurs. And they continue to manage earnings downward while the firm remains in violation. Because this scenario can play out within a year, the use of yearly...

In this dissertation, I examine the impact of earnings management and expectations management on the usefulness of earnings and analyst forecasts in firm valuation. Earnings and analyst forecasts are important inputs into accounting valuation models. Their ability to reflect current and predict...

Asymmetric persistence of accounting income is often tested in a regression of changes in earnings on lagged changes in earnings, including an interaction term for negative changes (see Basu [1997] or Ball et al. [2009] for a recent overview). In this note we propose an alternative, but closely...

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...

The literature on ‘cash flow' or ‘earnings' beta is theoretically well-motivated in its use of fundamentals, instead of returns, to measure systematic risk. However, empirical measures of earnings beta based on either log-linearizing the return equation or log-linearizing the clean-surplus...

The accounting literature has found evidence that acquirers in stock-for-stock M&A have typically managed earnings upwards ahead of a bid. Other literatures have concluded that, when stock prices are high and rising, M&A is higher, more M&A is financed with stock, market sentiment and...

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that the difference between reported earnings and permanent earnings approximates zero, on average. We measure a firm's permanent earnings using its stock price, and the short term interest rate determines the permanent earnings to price relation. The...