Psychologists have studied human behavior for over a century and, as a result, have developed a robust set of theories regarding how people behave. Most financial accounting issues deal with matters of human behavior, such as the judgments and decisions of managers, investors, analysts, and...

This paper reports descriptive evidence about how managers attempt to manage earnings, based on a sample of 515 earnings-management attempts obtained from a survey of 253 experienced auditors (and also analyzed by Nelson et al. 2002). We classify attempts first according to primary approach:...

This study provides descriptive evidence on the controversial trend adopted by many firms in recent years of reporting earnings figures on a "pro forma" basis. Pro forma earnings exclude normal income statement items that managers deem to be nonrecurring or nonrepresentative of ongoing...

This paper examines the role of earnings quality in the future performance of firms that marginally miss or beat analysts' forecasts. We focus primarily on two groups of firms: those that miss their forecast but appear not to have attempted to exceed it by managing earnings, and those that...

We provide evidence suggesting that managers use financial statement misstatements which improve reported results to facilitate acquisitions. Specifically, we find that firms misstating their financial statements are more likely to make stock-based acquisitions, but not cash-based acquisitions,...

This study examines whether bank lenders have different reactions to various types of real transaction management (RTM) by borrowing firms. Drawing upon Jensen and Meckling's asset substitution theory (1976) as well as banks' unique payoff functions and monitoring incentives, we predict and find...

We find a positive association between short-selling and accruals during 1988-2009, and that asymmetry between the long and short sides of the accrual anomaly is stronger when constraints on short-arbitrage are more severe (low availability of loanable shares as proxied by institutional...

This paper investigates whether and how the initiation of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) trading affects analyst optimism. First, we document that analyst forecasts become less optimistic after the initiation of CDS trading. Second, we find that the dampening effect of CDS on analyst optimism is...

Prior studies employ a two period empirical model and interpret the negative association between accruals in period one and returns in period two as evidence that investors misprice the information contained in accruals. In contrast to prior studies, I employ a three period log-linear model...

We revisit evidence whether incentives or IFRS drive earnings quality changes, analyzing a large sample of German firms in the period from 1998 to 2008. Consistent with previous studies we find that voluntary and mandatory adopters differ distinctively in terms of essential firm characteristics...