In asserting that the number of firms reporting small profits is abnormally high, thus suggesting that earnings management has taken place, accounting researchers assume that the distribution of reported earnings should be smooth for unmanaged earnings. This has never in fact been demonstrated....

Cet article s'appuie sur les travaux académiques des dix dernières années pour évaluer les effets de la réglementation française visant à accroître l'indépendance des auditeurs. Pour les sociétés cotées en bourse, l'obligation de recourir à deux auditeurs se solde notamment par une...

Section 340f of the German Commercial Code allows banks to provision against the special risks inherent to the banking business by building hidden reserves. Beyond risk provisioning, these reserves are implicitly accepted as an earnings management device. By analyzing financial statements of...

Prior research has estimated piece-meal the determinants of audit fees, non-audit fees and abnormal accruals. Intuition, informal analysis, and a variety of theories suggest that audit fees, non-audit fees, and abnormal accruals are jointly determined. We address this endogeneity issue by...

Degeorge, Patel and Zeckhauser (1999) show that companies willingly manage their earnings with the aim of meeting or exceeding three earnings targets: zero earnings, last period’s earnings, and analysts' earnings forecasts. In this paper, we focus on earnings management designed to...

This paper extends research on the corporate governance practices of transitional economies by examining whether the ability of the audit committee to constrain earnings management in Chinese firms is associated with the listing environment and the presence of government officials on the audit...

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...

Most regulations and corporate governance codes emphasize the adjective independent next to the words auditor and director because auditor and director independence is expected to result in better protection for shareholders and other stakeholders. In this study we use (1) the extent to which...

This study examines whether firms engage in earnings management to overcome government policies on limiting outward foreign direct investment (FDI), and whether their earnings-management behavior is aligned with shareholders’ interests. Using the regulatory setting in Taiwan, where the...

This study proposes and tests a model of the relations among corporate accountants’ perceptions of the ethical climate in their organization, the perceived importance of corporate ethics and social responsibility, and earnings management decisions. Based on a field survey of professional...