Most prior studies assume a positive relation between debt and earnings management, consistent with the financial distress theory. However, the empirical evidence for financial distress theory is mixed. Another stream of studies argues that lenders of short-term debt play a monitoring role over management, especially when the firm’s creditworthiness is not in doubt. To explore the implications ...

The main purpose of this study is to examine whether the mandatory IFRS adoption within French listed companies provides higher earnings quality. More precisely, we study the impact of mandatory IFRS adoption on two approaches of earnings management: real and accruals-based earnings management. This study focuses on a sample of 1488 firm-year observations, 124 firms drawn from the 250 French-li...

A fundamental role of accounting information in financial markets is to serve as a basis for capital allocation. An important attribute of the quality of accounting information is the extent to which earnings (accruals) map into cash flows. A poor mapping of accruals into cash flows reduces the information content of reported earnings and results in lower-quality earnings. If investors differ i...

I examine whether managerial stock and options holdings influence the propensity of goingpublic firms to manipulate financial information, as measured by the incidence of shareholder class action lawsuits and discretionary accruals. Examining a sample of U.S. firms that went public during the years 1996-2006, I find some evidence that firms in which top managers receive large stock options gran...

Despite the large number of papers purporting to identify earnings management, the current techniques used to identify it are sorely lacking. In general, they are based on the assumption that accruals unexplained by a linear projection on firm-level observables (i.e., discretionary accruals) represent either explicit earnings management or poor quality earnings.1 Namely, these techniques assume...

This paper examines the usefulness of accounting information in predicting earnings management. We investigate a comprehensive sample of firms from 1971-2000 that restated annual earnings. We find that firms restating earnings have high market expectations for future earnings growth and have higher levels of outstanding debt. We also find that a primary motivation for the earnings manipulation ...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms optimally adjust their capital investment in response to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the correlations of accruals with past and current stock returns; (ii) controlling for investment substa...