CAN AUDIT COMMITTEE REDUCE REAL EARNINGS MANAGEMENT?

Audit effort and earnings management

We test the effect of audit effort on earnings management using a unique database of hours worked by auditors on 9,738 audits in Greece between 1994 and 2002. When audit hours are lower, (1) abnormal accruals are more often positive than negative, (2) positive abnormal accruals are larger, and (3) companies are more likely to manage earnings upwards in order to meet or beat the zero earnings be...

The Informativeness of Reported Earnings and Characteristics of the Audit Committee

An information usefulness approach to decision making points out that only the information is regarded as useful that will bring valuable messages to investors and lead to stock price adjustments. This study examines the effectiveness of audit committees in improving earnings quality and informativeness, particularly among family-owned firms. Earnings informativeness was measured through the re...

Audit Committee, Underpricing of Ipos and Accuracy of Management Earnings Forecasts

The Effect of Disclosing Earnings Forecasting Characteristics on Company Risk concerning to Real Earnings Management

Earnings prediction is one of the most important communication channels for transferring information to investors. Despite the importance of earnings prediction, few studies examined whether  real earnings management are effective in predicting them. In this paper, the effect of earnings forecasting on firm risk is reviewed by considering real earnings management. Since earnings prediction char...

Debt covenant slack and real earnings management

We examine the relation between firms’ real earnings management decisions and the slack in their net worth debt covenant. Using private debt covenant data, we find that the overall level of real earnings management is higher when net worth covenant slack is tighter. Moreover, we find that this effect is more pronounced for loan-years with the tightest slack, which is a setting where benefits of...