Earnings Management Literature Research Articles

Strategic Compensation and Firm Performance: The Mediating Role of Earnings Management in Taiwan

This study bridges a notable gap in the earnings management literature by incorporating R&D expenses into a novel research model. It categorizes earnings management into two types: predictive and opportunistic. This research explores the intricate relationship among earnings management, compensation structures, and firm performance—a triad of persistent concern to regulators, practitioners, and academics alike. Our findings reveal that in Taiwan, an emerging market, corporate governance mechanisms like compensation policies significantly influence executive behavior and overall firm performance. Specifically, we demonstrate that enhancing executive compensation can improve firm outcomes by encouraging executives to engage in predictive earnings management.

Economic uncertainty, risk-taking incentives and production management

PurposeThis study aims to validate the link between production manipulation and a firm’s performance variability (fundamentals and stock returns). It explores whether executives' risk-taking incentives encourage production deviations around the normal level during uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachUtilizing panel data of manufacturing firms from Compustat over three decades, the study investigates production management practices during economic uncertainty. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (EPU) is employed as a key metric. The empirical strategy involves documenting the effect of economic uncertainty on overproduction and underproduction, examining the role of executive compensation and assessing the impact on risk.FindingsThe research finds that risk-taking incentives increase over/underproduction, particularly amplifying the extent of underproduction during uncertainty. Production deviation rises, indicating that firms take greater risk by engaging in abnormal business operations. The study’s results are robust against various econometric methods, emphasizing the influence of risk-taking incentives on corporate production decisions.Research limitations/implicationsWhile providing valuable insights, the study acknowledges inherent limitations, including factors influencing production decisions beyond risk-taking incentives. Further research could explore additional determinants for a comprehensive understanding.Practical implicationsThe findings highlight the potential dark side of executive compensation that motivates suboptimal risk-taking decisions, impacting risk, cost of capital and firm performance. Policymakers and compensation committees can use these insights to design efficient systems that mitigate moral hazard problems associated with productivity changes.Social implicationsThe study emphasizes the broader social implications of production manipulation under uncertainty. It prompts discussions on the ethical considerations of managerial opportunism, its potential consequences for stakeholders and market dynamics.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature by examining the role of economic uncertainty on production manipulation and the influence of risk-taking incentives. It extends the earnings management literature by considering real activity manipulation and emphasizing the importance of decomposing production deviation into positive and negative values.

Do City Governments Manage their Financial Data Prior to Issuing Bonds

Governmental Accounting Standings Board (GASB) Statement No. 34 requires financial reporting for state and local governments. The motivation behind GASB 34 was to make governmental financial reports more comprehensive and transparent. Until its implementation, data on state and local governments was not reported consistently from entity to entity. This paper extends the earnings management literature to include municipalities and funds management. In particular, earnings cannot be reported in governmental units. Instead, Changes in Fund Balance is used. Thus, a unique contribution is the use of earnings management models to test Fund Balance management. We use a version of the Jones model (Meisel, 2007). Specifically, we test whether city governments manage their financial data for events such as debt or bond issues to achieve certain benchmarks. We find that cities are motivated to manage their financial information lower in the year just before the bondissue.

Antecedents and Consequences of Earnings Management: A Systematic Review of the Banking Sector in Developed and Developing Countries

The accuracy and utility of financial information are critical, but the prevalent issue of earnings management (EM) casts a shade on this goal. With a growing corpus of EM literature, a comprehensive review is essential for distilling insights and guiding future research. The paper systematically reviews 182 EM studies through the distinctive lens of developing and developed country banking institutions. With an emphasis on accrual-EM, the current study thoroughly examines and synthesizes the antecedents and consequences of bank EM. Notably, certain themes (such as corporate governance, international financial reporting standards, ownership structure and liquidity) emerge as universally relevant, bridging the gap between developed and developing markets. Conversely, themes like bank efficiency, social capital, funding structure and institutional quality, among others, tend to be context-specific. Further, the study developed a conceptual framework of antecedents and consequences of bank EM by segregating them into developed, developing, and cross-country contexts. The study is unique in its developed and developing context of appraising EM literature. The results provide a better understanding of pertinent elements in diverse institutional settings that can aid regulators and policymakers in making decisions by identifying facilitators, mitigators and consequences in developed and developing economies.

Do analysts’ earnings forecasts exclude earnings management? Evidence from audit adjustments

ABSTRACT Using audit adjustments to infer earnings management, we find that analysts’ earnings forecasts exclude a large amount of earnings management. The exclusion is greater for firms with larger institutional ownership and for firms with higher analyst following, where analysts have strong incentive to forecast economic earnings that are free of earnings management. Although auditors ultimately adjust the same earnings management from reported earnings, analysts are able to timely disseminate firms’ economic earnings to the market. Our study sheds light on analysts’ informational role in the capital markets and extends the boundary of the earnings management literature by investigating the earnings management adjusted by auditors instead of the earnings management remaining in reported earnings.

The audit committee and earnings management: new evidence from the H-share listed companies on the exchange stock of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This paper selects H-share companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong from 2008 to 2018 as research samples and designs an OLS regression model to empirically test the impact of the quality of the audit committee measured by the four aspects of the characteristics of the audit committee on the earnings management level of the company based on the Jones model. It concludes that when the overall quality of the company’s audit committee is higher, the company’s earnings management level is lower. This conclusion strongly proves that the establishment and effective operation of an audit committee plays an important role in improving corporate governance and restraining earnings manipulation by the management team and the governance role. This paper provides empirical evidence to help corporation leaders and stakeholders make better decisions on management and investment on H-share listed companies. The innovation and contributions and to audit and earnings management literature and implications and innovation for regulators and investors are also discussed.

Asset Volatility and Financial Sustainability

This study observes how companies’ fundamental-based asset volatility impacts their financial sustainability. Accounting literature documents that net assets value accumulates previous earnings management. The asset balance change reflects biased earnings measurement, and abnormal asset fluctuation signals aggressive earnings management. This paper uses delisting as a proxy to observe how asset volatility can interact with abnormal earnings fluctuation to impact firms’ sustainability. The study uses two groups of regression and a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Logistic Regression approach to observe how asset volatility impacts companies’ delisting risk. It borrows the Six Sigma methodologies to measure the volatility of financial statement items. Then the PCA analysis reduces the data dimensions to twelve factors. The analysis shows that assets’ abnormal fluctuation is a risk signal concurring with the extant earnings management literature. One takeaway from this study is that companies must disclose detailed explanations if asset volatility is beyond a red line. As Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) 151 requires direct disclosure of abnormal excess capacity costs, companies must disclose abnormal asset volatility. The paper contributes to the literature from two perspectives. First, this paper captures firms’ sustainability from the accounting perspective with fundamental measures from quarterly financial reports. It provides a comprehensive way to detect aggressive earnings management risks. Second, the PCA logistic regression model offers a comprehensive analysis to derive useful information from many attributes.

Do Chief Audit Executives Able to Influence Real Earnings Management Practices? Evidence from Indonesia

Purpose : This study aims to investigate the relationship between financial expertise and tenure of the Chief Audit Executive [CAE] on real earnings management [REM] practices
 Method : This study uses a sample of 797 observations from companies in the manufacturing sector in Indonesia during the period 2012 – 2019. For data analysis, regression of feasible generalized least squares was used. Data related to financial expertise and tenure of CAE were manually collected from the annual report and financial data was obtained from Thomson-Reuters Database. 
 Findings : The results of this study indicate that CAE with better financial expertise is associated with lower REM. Conversely, this study also indicates that CAE tenure has an association with higher REM. This result is robust by using an alternative REM measurement. By breaking down the indicators of CAE’s financial expertise, namely CAE’s certification, experience in financial positions within/inside the company or outside the company, the results show that CAE certification has the largest effect on REM.
 Novelty : This study contributes to the real earnings management and internal audit literature by demonstrating the importance of attributes possessed by CAEs as leaders of the internal audit function in mitigating REM practices.
 Keywords : Chief Audit Executive, Financial Expertise, Tenure, Real Earnings Management

Unveiling the Connection among ESG, Earnings Management, and Financial Distress: Insights from an Emerging Market

Earnings management continues to be a critical ethical concern faced by companies. The management that conducts earnings manipulation may adopt environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities to safeguard themselves from stakeholders. Engagement in ESG is sometimes viewed as a type of managerial misconduct and as a means to cover up manipulative practices. Thus, the key aim of our study is to investigate the association between ESG disclosure and earnings management levels in the context of listed companies in Saudi Arabia. We also investigate the influence of financial distress on the above association. Data were obtained from 304 company-year observations for the years 2014–2021. The results showed that ESG disclosure had a positive and statistically significant effect on earnings management. In addition, financial distress significantly and positively enhanced this effect. This shows that financially distressed companies tend to disclose more ESG practices and engage in earnings management. Moreover, through the division of the three ESG components—environmental, social, and governance—the impacts of both environmental and social factors on earnings management were found to be positive and robust, while the governance score was negative. The results obtained using diverse regression techniques and further tests were robust. This study makes several contributions to the ESG and earnings management literature. It also minimizes the literature gap by focusing on the influences of financial distress on the ESG–earnings management relationship. The study findings have implications for several stakeholder groups, including regulators, decision makers, investors, and auditors. In particular, it warns policymakers that some practices focused on ESG enhancements may be a tool for preventing other questionable practices.

The Effects of Business Strategy and Product Market Competition on Real Earnings Management

This research investigated the singular and combined effects of firm-level business strategy (BS) and industry-level market competition (MC) on real activities-based earnings management (REM). A composite strategy score based on Miles and Snow’s framework was used to empirically assess BS, while MC was measured through three distinct metrics, and REM was calculated based on Roychowdhury’s (2006) models of abnormal level of production, sales, and discretionary expenditures. Archival data from United Stated (U.S.) non-financial public listed firms in the period 1987-2020 was analyzed using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions, controlled for industry and year fixed effects. Findings suggested that firms following an innovation-oriented prospector strategy are associated with lower levels of REM than firms following an efficiency-oriented defender strategy. While MC alone did not have a significant effect on REM, the combined effect of BS and MC reveals that prospectors in more competitive markets engage less in REM activities, which confirms the relevance of competition in the relationship between BS and REM. This research contributes to earnings management literature by documenting that REM practices are affected not only by internal choices of resource allocation in accordance with a business strategy, but also by exogenous determinants of market competition.

Audit Quality, Institutional Environments, and Earnings Management: An Empirical Analysis of New Listings

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between audit quality, the role of institutional environments at the provincial level, and earnings management around listing events by using data from 189 newly-listed companies on the Hochiminh Stock Exchange. Audit quality was proxied by Big4, auditor tenure, and auditor industry specialization, while earnings management was quantified as current discretionary accruals. The findings indicated that there was no role for Big 4, auditor tenure, and auditor industry specialization in curbing earnings management, as indicated by the regression result of the full sample. Interestingly, the effect differed substantially across signs of earnings management. The regression results of different forms of earnings management showed a contrast and indicated that the auditor tenure can mitigate the activities of income-increasing activities in the positive model, the auditor tenure and auditor industry specialization can explain the incentives for managing earnings in the negative model. Moreover, this study found no evidence of the impact of provincial governance on earnings management in the full regression model. However, a negative effect of provincial governance on earnings management was found in the case of a motive for upward earnings management, while good governance tends to provide greater benefits to reduce the occurrence of negative earnings management. After controlling for dummy listing and interaction variables that may be related to audit quality and institutional environment, this relationship remains unchanged. Finally, The study’s findings make several contributions to the earnings management literature and are relevant for investors, policymakers, and firms.

DEVELOPING AN IMPROVED MEASURE OF EARNINGS MANAGEMENT

Over the last 30 years, researchers have developed different approaches to measure earnings management. This study builds on prior research and combines the total accrual approach and the earnings distribution after management approach to develop a more accurate measure of earnings management. Empirical results show that this refined measure developed in this study is able to more precisely identify firms that manipulated earnings (manipulators) and firms that did not manipulate earnings (non-manipulators). This contributes to the earnings management literature a more accurate measure of earnings management to meet or beat a specific earnings benchmark. The results of this paper has practical implications. In particular, practitioners (financial analysts and investors) can use the new measure developed in this study to more accurately detect firms' earnings management activities. This enables practitioners to better interpret firms' financial statements and earnings news.

Financial Distress and Earnings Management: Evidence from Malaysia before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The main objective of this study is to determine the choice of earnings management approach among financially distressed firms in the period before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The manager may choose either Accrual Earnings Management (AEM) or Real Earnings Management (REM). This study uses the modified Jones, 1991, model for AEM. Whereby for REM is the Abnormal Cash Flow from Operation (AbCFO), Abnormal Production Cost (AbPROD), and Abnormal Discretionary Expenses (AbDISEXP) model by Roychowdhury, 2006. Using a final sample of 672 firms year observation consisting of Malaysian public listed companies for the period of 2018 to 2021, this study reveals that financially distressed firms do manipulate earnings using the REM approach both before and during the pandemic. Further analysis discovers that those firms specifically practice AbCFO and AbDISEXP in managing earnings. This study also finds a significant negative relationship between financial distress and the AEM approach. In addition, some other control variables such as leverage, firm size, ROA and liquidity also have a significant effect on EM. This study contributes to the earnings management literature, notably how managers choose to manipulate earnings at the different levels of financial health, which then can influence the accounting earnings quality.

Does earnings management affect linguistic features of MD&A disclosures?

Earnings management literature considers high disclosure complexity as indicative of obfuscation. We argue that this singular focus on disclosure complexity can be misleading as managers adopt other obfuscation strategies too to conceal earnings management. We examine several alternative obfuscation strategies using a sample of 67,649 management discussion and analysis (MD&A) disclosures of US firms from 1994 to 2020. We find that managers obfuscate not only by increasing the disclosure complexity but also by omitting negative information, reducing information content, and projecting confidence about the state of the business. Robustness tests suggest that our findings are robust to potential endogeneity concerns.

Temporal evidence on threshold hierarchy based on accruals and real earnings management: Evidence from France and the US

Research Questions: Does the hierarchy of earnings thresholds differ between accounting systems? Does a temporal shift occur in the hierarchy of the earnings thresholds associated with earnings management? Motivation: A number of studies looked into the hierarchy of earnings thresholds based on the earnings distribution, capital market valuation, survey views, and discretionary accruals. Our study seeks to fill this gap by investigating the hierarchy of earnings thresholds based on real earnings management and by investigating if the hierarchy of earnings thresholds differs between accounting systems. Idea: This paper aims to examine the hierarchy of achieving certain earnings thresholds based on the magnitude of discretionary accruals and real earnings management under two different accounting models. Tools: Large samples of US and French firms for the period ranging from 2008 to 2018 are used. The relative extent of both discretionary accruals and real earnings management used to achieve three earnings thresholds is examined by regression analyses. Findings: Two hierarchies emerge from the US and French contexts. On the one hand, we find (1) avoiding earnings losses, (2) avoiding earnings decreases, and (3) avoiding negative earnings surprises in the US context. On the other hand, we find out (1) avoiding earnings losses, (2) avoiding negative earnings surprises, and (3) avoiding earnings decreases in the French context. An analysis of the real earnings management behavior of these firms indicates that they have used the significant real earnings management for the purpose of avoiding earnings decreases in both contexts. These hierarchies are reorganized over time. Contribution: Our paper contributes to the existing literature in several ways. First, the majorities of studies on earnings management examine and validate opportunistic incentives, whereas our results validate incentives with reference to the signaling theory. Second, our findings are of interest to investors, auditors, regulators and academics with respect to the financial statement analysis, accounting earnings quality, and financial reporting. Research limitations: This study is subject to measurement error which is a common limitation in the earnings management literature.

Detecting earnings management: a comparison of accrual and real earnings manipulation models

PurposeThe use of models for detecting earnings management in the academic literature, using accrual and real manipulation, is commonplace. The purpose of the current study is to compare the power of these models in a United Kingdom (UK) sample of 19,424 firm-year observations during the period 1991–2018. The authors include artificially-induced manipulation of revenues and expenses between zero and ten percent of total assets to random samples of 500 firm-year observations within the full sample. The authors use two alternative samples, one with no reversal of manipulation (sample 1) and one with reversal in the following year (sample 2).Design/methodology/approachThe authors include artificially induced manipulation of revenues and expenses between zero and ten percent of total assets to random samples of 500 firm-year observations within the full sample.FindingsThe authors find that real earnings manipulation models have lower power than accrual earnings manipulation models, when manipulating discretionary expenses and revenues. Furthermore, the real earnings manipulation model to detect overproduction has high misspecification, resulting in artificially inflating the power of the model. The authors examine an alternative model to detect discretionary expense manipulation that generates higher power than the Roychowdhury (2006) model. Modified real manipulation models (Srivastava, 2019) are used as robustness and the authors find these to be more misspecified in some cases but less in others. The authors extend the analysis to a setting in which earnings management is known to occur, i.e. around benchmark-beating and find consistent evidence of accrual and some forms of real manipulation in this sample using all models examined.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the literature by providing evidence of misspecification of currently used models to detect real accounts manipulation.Practical implicationsBased on the findings, the authors recommend caution in interpreting any findings when using these models in future research.Originality/valueThe findings address the earnings management literature, guided by the agency theory.

Earnings management: a bibliometric analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a bibliometric analysis of earnings management (EM), providing an overview of the main results and research trends in this area. EM is a relevant topic in financial studies. It has been widely studied over the past few decades as a phenomenon of intentional manipulation of financial reporting.Design/methodology/approachThe Web of Science (WoS) database was used as a source, and this study has adopted VOSviewer as the bibliometric analysis tool to achieve an overview of EM research and understand current research trends on this matter. This study has collected data from 4,342 articles published from 1900 to 2020.FindingsThe conclusions of this study show that EM is strongly related to corporate governance, performance and quality of information. Publication trends and categories are useful to understand the development of trends and current domains in this area. This research analyses the most productive authors, countries and journals. This study conducted a cluster analysis using a keyword perspective to obtain emerging trends in EM. Research in EM through real activities represents a research gap, which can be an opportunity for future research.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors recognize as limitations the fact that the study is limited to the WoS database. Another limitation is the keywords used for the search, as this study only uses “earnings management”, as it is the most used keyword in EM literature. An additional limitation is associated with the selection of only one type of document, “articles,” disregarding other types of publications.Originality/valueAlthough there are some bibliometric studies on EM, this study found out that they focus on specific EM topics and fail to analyze this theme on a global scale. Most of the literature on this subject is disperse and consequently needs systematization. This research is also relevant for academic purpose, as this research contributes to understanding the state of art and contributes to the development of scientific knowledge by providing a systematization of the literature on the topic of EM.

Corporate site visits, private information communication, and earnings management: evidence from China

PurposeThis paper aims to provide new evidence that corporate site visits give institutional investors better opportunities to obtain information and exert monitoring powers, which reduce listed firms’ earnings management.Design/methodology/approachThis paper explores how private communications affect firms’ earnings management by using a sample of institutional investors’ visits to the corporate sites of Chinese listed firms between 2010 and 2018. This study uses the performance-matched Jones model (Kothari et al., 2005) to measure accrual-based earnings management and Roychowdhury’s (2006) method to measure real earnings management. The authors also perform several robustness checks including an alternative measure of accounting accruals, a two-stage instrumental regression and the Heckman two-step approach.FindingsUsing a sample of institutional investors’ site visits to Chinese listed firms during the 2010–2018 period, this study finds that institutional investors’ site visits reduce listed firms’ earnings manipulation activities (both accrual-based and real). This association is robust to several checks, including an alternative measure of accounting accruals, a two-stage instrumental regression and the Heckman two-step approach. This study further documents that other private communication approaches such as private in-house meetings and conference calls moderate the effect of site visits.Practical implicationsAs the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is one of the few stock markets to mandate that listed firms record and disclose their private communication information, this study also has implications for researchers and policymakers who work in other stock markets.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first comprehensive study of the impact of private communications on earnings management. This study extends the earnings management literature by examining institutional investors’ information acquisition process and revealing a negative association between their site visits and listed firms’ earnings management. Moreover, this study examines the effects not only on traditional accounting accruals but also on real earnings management. In addition to studies that emphasize the effect of corporate site visits on individuals and market reactions, this study examines the effect of site visits on firms’ financial misbehavior. This study shows that institutional investors’ corporate site visits provide external monitoring that mitigates listed firms’ earnings management behavior.

Substitution between Accrual-Based Earnings Management and Real Activities Manipulation—A Commentary and Guidance for Future Research

ABSTRACTConsidering the voluminous published research confirming and extending the original findings of Cohen, Dey, and Lys (2008), we conclude that Pincus, Wu, and Hwang (2022) make a modest contribution to the earnings management literature. Specifically, their analysis does not incorporate recent advances in the earnings management literature, especially the measurement and estimation of real earnings management activities and the incorporation of the changing information environment. As a result, we conclude that the Pincus et al. (2022) results and conclusions with regards to the substitution between accrual-based and real earnings management activities should be interpreted with caution.JEL Classifications: G10; M4.

Do Firms Time Changes in Accounting Estimates to Manage Earnings?†

ABSTRACTPrior earnings management research often focuses on specific accounts or on estimations of discretionary accruals but provides only limited insight into the methods firms actually use to manage earnings. In order to begin exploration of some of the operational details regarding how earnings are managed, we investigate whether firms time their decisions to make changes in accounting estimates (CAEs) in consideration of their earnings benchmarks. Using CAE data across all accounts from 2006 to 2018, we find that 28.1% of income‐increasing CAEs are implemented in quarters where pre‐CAE earnings are below a forecasted earnings benchmark but inclusion of the CAE effectively allows the firm to meet the benchmark. We find that income‐increasing CAEs are more likely implemented when a firm's pre‐CAE earnings are further below the benchmark. We also find that firms are more likely to implement income‐decreasing CAEs under two scenarios: (i) when pre‐CAE earnings are relatively high, as a way either to smooth earnings or to “bury bad news,” and (ii) when pre‐CAE earnings are already low, as a way to take a financial “big bath” and position the firm for positive future earnings. In addition, we present evidence that firms using CAEs to achieve an earnings benchmark face financial consequences in terms of poorer immediate stock price performance and subsequent return on assets. Our conclusions hold after performing several additional analyses, including consideration of other discretionary options, addressing endogeneity concerns, and conducting falsification tests. In sum, we contribute to the earnings management literature by presenting consistent evidence that firms appear to time CAEs to meet earnings benchmarks or achieve other reporting objectives.