Recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that blockholders (shareholders with ownership ≥ 5%) exert governance through the threat of exit. Blockholders have strong incentives to gather private information and sell their shares when managers are perceived to underperform. To prevent...

This paper studies the drivers behind the monitoring effectiveness of institutional investors in curbing earnings management in an international setting. We identify three distinct drivers and propose two competing hypotheses: the hometown advantage hypothesis predicts that because of proximity...

This paper examines how constraints on firms' financing capacity relate to managers' discretionary accounting choices. Three hypotheses of earnings management — the opportunism hypothesis, the rational expectations hypothesis, and the signaling hypothesis — predict that constrained firms...

This paper examines earnings management activities around debt covenant violations. We focus on accruals management and real activities manipulation behavior of managers in the quarters around the covenant violation. We expect covenant restrictions to influence these activities in the quarters...

In this paper, we investigate how real estate portfolio composition impacts earnings management (EM) of New Zealand listed property portfolios (NZ-LPPs). We employ a panel dataset containing accounting and property data for NZ-LPPs. The findings include: (1) the office property ratio of the real...

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,...

This study examined the influence of agency conflict Type I (as represented by managerial ownership and institutional ownership), and agency conflict Type II (as represented by Control Rights, Cash Flow Rights, Cash Flow Rights leverage) on earnings management. A model was developed and tested...

In this paper we test whether between-country variation in individuals' tendency to conform, as measured by a social desirability scale used in the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, can explain differences in the propensity to employ earnings management in corporations around the world. Such a...

We investigate the interplay between creditor financing and the smoothness of earnings reported by European private firms and document how heterogeneous debt-contracting infrastructures across Europe moderate this relation. Most European private firms are owner-manager run enterprises with...

In this paper, we investigate whether refinancing pressure leads managers to manipulate earnings. Our tests examine the relation between changes in short-term debt and discretionary accruals. We find that firms have higher discretionary accruals during periods of increasing short-term debt. We...