China has sustained a rapid rate of economic growth and absorbed a great deal of foreign investment over the past decades. However, the laws pertaining to business in China have not kept up with China's market growth. For this reason, investors in the Chinese stock market must assess associated...

This study examines the association between real earnings management, governance attributes, and IPO failure risk. Using a sample of 4174 IPOs firms that went public over the period of 1998-2011, we find evidence that real earnings management and governance attributes are associated with IPO...

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these accruals do not appear to benefit managers and...

Ideally, firms should discontinue projects that become unprofitable. Managers, however, continue to operate such projects because of their limited employment horizons and empire-building motivations (Jensen, 1986; Ball, 2001). Prior studies suggest that timely loss recognition in accounting earnings...

Meeks and Meeks (2022, MM for short)* has a question in its subtitle, Why spend ever more on mergers when so many fail? There are three interwoven strands in the book’s answer:First, contracts (explicit and implicit) often reward key players in the M&A market — executives and advisers —...

This study tests the hypothesis that the target firms are involved in earnings management activities in quarters leading to a takeover announcement. Using a sample of 3,455 Chinese listed firms that are targets of successful acquisitions over the period 2007-2020, and for a matched sample of...

This paper examines whether high-ability managers’ earnings smoothing is motivated by the need to mitigate the adverse effects of heightened information asymmetry, triggered by mergers and acquisitions (M&As), on managers’ reputation capital (job loss) and firm value. We document that...

This paper investigates the impact of social media on financial reporting quality. By analyzing data from the leading Internet stock message board in China, we demonstrate that postings on stock message boards could promote earnings management. This finding is further enhanced by employing the...