We investigate the relationship between the transparency of loan loss provision disclosures and the provisioning practices of privately held banks. We study a unique change in disclosure regulation under German banking law which introduces mandatory disclosures of loan loss provisions. Using...

Bird, Karolyi, and Ruchti (2019) estimate a structural model of earnings management in the setting of meeting-or-beating the analyst consensus forecast. I provide an overview of their methods and findings, and then discuss the assumptions, benefits, and limitations of their approach

This study investigates how the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) affects the contractual benefits of using accounting information to determine executive compensation in China. After controlling for firm and corporate governance characteristics, we find...

In this paper, we present a review of tax research in accounting. We outline U.S. GAAP accounting rules for the following four income tax notes and survey the area of research literature dealing with the information content provided by U.S. GAAP: (1) unrecognized tax benefits, (2) valuation...

The purpose of our study is to further understand managerial incentives that affect the volatility of reported fiscal-year earnings. We do this by examining income smoothing based on pseudo fiscal years. For each firm, we create pseudo-year earnings using four consecutive quarters other than the...

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of social relations among the board members on earnings management in Pakistani listed companies. Specifically, we have analyzed the social networks between CEO and outside board members. The modified Jones model has been used in this study to...

This paper examines the role of overbilling in hospitals' earnings management choices. Overbilling by hospitals is a form of revenue manipulation that involves misclassifying a patient into a diagnosis-related group that yields higher reimbursement. As overbilling allows hospitals to increase...

In a 2016 paper (Fang, Huang, and Karpoff, 2016), we report that firms exposed to an increase in the prospect of short selling during the Reg SHO pilot program have lower discretionary accruals during the pilot period. Black, Desai, Litvak, Yoo, and Yu (2019, hereafter, BDLYY) argue that this...

Accounting research has long claimed that banks time sales of available-for-sale securities to smooth earnings. We find that what the prior literature calls smoothing is more accurately characterized as boosting of low earnings. That is, the “smoothing” behavior is asymmetric, occurring at...

The study examines the effect of earnings management by classification shifting on firm success, focusing on the survival of newly listed firms. We argue that shifting income-decreasing expenses from core to special items should negatively associate with future operating performance because of...