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...

We propose a modification to the Dechow and Dichev (2002) model (DD hereafter) by replacing realized next-period cash flows with forecasted future cash flows. We first theorize the relation between the modified- and original DD model and that between abnormal accruals from the modified DD model...

Using establishment-level micro data on Compustat firms, we develop a novel decomposition of firm employment growth. Our decomposition reveals that on average, firms in this sample rely more on growth from acquiring and founding new establishments than on growth of existing establishments....