We examine the costs and benefits of proactive financial reporting enforcement by the UK Financial Reporting Review Panel. Enforcement scrutiny is selective and varies by sector and over time, yet can be anticipated by auditors and companies. We find evidence that increased enforcement intensity...

This paper investigates the impact of margin trading on firms' financial reporting. Using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach that exploits staggered elimination of margin trading bans, it reports a significant effect of margin trading on earnings management. Treated firms increase...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has long asserted that earnings management practices result in adverse consequences for investors. We examine whether SEC oversight affects firms' accounting quality in terms of earnings management trade-offs. We expect that increased firm-specific...

Conventional and commonly held wisdom with respect to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is that they lead to improved financial reporting quality and comparability and thereby favorable economic consequences. There are however contradicting evidences disproving...

We re-examine the motivation to manage earnings in US M&As, by investigating whether the enactment of SOX has affected pre-merger earnings management. Using a sample of over 700 completed M&As of US public firms during 1999-2008. Using quarterly reports, we track-down earnings management during...

This paper investigates whether the current IFRS enforcement system at a supra-national level can prevent opportunistic behaviors at a national level that conflict with the major objectives of accounting harmonization. In this perspective, it identifies a new type of earnings management, new...

We examine the effect of government ownership and its associated institutional incentives on firms' earnings quality using a sample of Chinese firms during the transitional economy between 1998 and 2005 when state-owned and non-state-owned firms were traded in the stock exchanges. We find that,...

Lobo and Zhou (2006) find an increase in accounting conservatism following the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. In Japan, the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act of 2006, the so-called Japanese Sarbanes–Oxley Act (J-SOX), was implemented for fiscal years ending on or after March 31, 2009....

We investigate whether managerial risk aversion, as measured by CEO political ideology, affects corporate decisions to undertake earnings management. Using a sample of 10,799 firm-year observations for S&P 1500 firms during the period from 1996 to 2008, we document that Republican CEOs, who tend...

We examine how clawback provisions and board monitoring affect managers' use of discretion to achieve earnings targets. Using an experiment, we find that when board monitoring is weak, imposing clawback provisions has little impact on the total amount of earnings management activity. This null...