We examine whether UK firms engage in earnings management or forecast guidance to ensure that their reported earnings meet analyst earnings expectations. We explore two earnings management mechanisms: a) positive abnormal working capital accruals and b) classification shifting of core expenses...

The purpose of this study is to investigate into the discretionary accruals of the client companies of sanctioned auditors before sanction enforcements and changes thereafter. We find that signed discretionary accruals of the sanctioned auditors' client companies are significantly more favorable...

Prior research documents that conditional conservatism, measured as the asymmetric timeliness of earnings reflecting bad versus good news, varies with cross-country differences in institutional regimes. In this paper, we examine the determinants of conditional conservatism and related earnings...

When annual earnings are regressed on annual returns, the returns coefficient is higher when returns are negative. The difference between the coefficients of earnings on positive and negative returns is called asymmetric timeliness of earnings and, in the accounting literature, is used...

Lang, Raedy and Wilson (2006) examine the properties of U.S. GAAP accounting numbers provided by cross-listed firms and compare them to those of U.S. firms. Using a wide range of properties related to earnings management, timely loss recognition, and value relevance, LRW show that accounting...

Previous studies (Dumontier and Raffournier, 1998, El-Gazzar et al, 1999; Cuijpers and Buijink, 2004) typically explain the early adoption of IFRS by firm-specific benefits. However, the adoption of IFRS also leads to costs for company insiders, namely less managerial discretion and as a consequence...

We analyze the ability of the capital structure and the ownership structure as mechanisms of control of the managers of the firms and to reduce their accounting discretionary power for a sample of Chilean firms. Using earnings management and abnormal accruals as indicators of discretionary...

This paper examines whether firm managers engage in the expectation management of their current performances through their own forecasts and consecutive adjustments. Expectation management in order to achieve positive surprises by lowering analyst forecast levels has been documented (Bernhardt...

We test the earnings management behavior of Russian companies in the years 2001 and 2002. We analyze the effects of ownership structure on the extent of tax management. We first hypothesize that Russian firms manage earnings downwards to reduce income taxes. We test for irregularities in the...

Two standard setting approaches have emerged globally to guide the choice of accounting for securitizations: the control and components approach (FAS125/FAS140) and the risks and rewards transfer approach (IAS39). A lack of consensus about derecognition accounting is a major impediment to...