Objective – The Indonesian Accounting Standard Authority has required companies to adopt the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) since its adoption in 2012. The new standard emphasizes relevance, while the previous standard focused on conservative issues. While the IFRS does not...

Does the impact of international Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) inspections extend beyond country borders of inspected auditors? We investigate this question by examining multinational business groups. Following initial PCAOB inspections of accounting firms auditing foreign...

The paper aims to examine earnings management practices in local governments, focusing on two Mediterranean countries, namely Greece and Italy that have comparable administration systems. According to public choice theory, the conflicting interests between politicians who pursue re-election and...

Using the Miles & Snow (1978, 2003) strategy typology and a measure of strategy based on Bentley, Omar, & Sharp (2013) and Ittner, Larcker, & Rajan (1997), we investigate whether business strategy is associated with the quality of reported earnings. Our sample comprises 44,264 firm-year...

This study investigates the influence of the board chairman's involvement in the audit committee (AC) (as a proxy of AC independence) on earnings management (EM) practices. We examine Bursa Malaysia listed firms with slight positive earnings for the years 2013 to 2015. Using ordinary least...

This paper investigates and compares the earnings management strategies of listed and unlisted firms during situations involving financial difficulties. The evidence from a sample of 6,407 French non-financial entities from 2009 to 2016 shows that, in the presence of severe financial problems,...

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...

The present paper aims to provide empirical evidence regarding the impact of shareholder activism on earnings management. Specifically, it is focused on investigating the moderating role of an external governance mechanism such as external audit quality. Based on a sample of French companies...

Prior research finds that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (US-SOX) of 2002 has affected earnings management in the United States. Cohen et al. (2008) indicate that accrual-based earnings management has declined since the passage of US-SOX, while real earnings management has increased. Further, Gilliam et...

During 2005 to 2007, the SEC ordered a pilot program in which one-third of the Russell 3000 index were arbitrarily chosen as pilot stocks and exempted from short-sale price tests. Pilot firms' discretionary accruals and likelihood of marginally beating earnings targets decrease during this...