This paper examines the earnings management behavior of Japanese merger acquirers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Most Japanese mergers are transacted via stock swaps, when acquirers have incentive to manage pre-merger earnings to reduce the cost of acquisition. Consistent with this incentive, Japanese acquirers have significantly positive long-term abnormal accruals in the year prior to the merge...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of the characteristics of board of directors (Chief Executive Officer Duality, CEO tenure duration, size and independence of the board of directors) on earnings management. In this study, data from 62 companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years of 2011 to 2015 were used. The statistical method used in this research is panel ...

Prior research has investigated the association between executive equity compensation and earnings management but the evidence is not conclusive. We investigate this question using the quantile regression approach which allows the coefficient on the independent variable (equity compensation) to shift across the distribution of the dependent variable (earnings management). Based on a sample of 1...

Previous literature studying analysts’ earnings forecasts examines their properties without considering firms’ response to analysts’ forecasts. This study improves upon previous research by considering firms’ earnings management with respect to analysts’ forecasts. I hypothesize that analysts understand firms’ earnings management practices, and incorporate firms’ expected behavior into their fo...

Text is not unadulterated fact. A text can make you laugh or cry but can it also make you short sell your stocks in company A and buy up options in company B? Research in the domain of finance strongly suggests that it can. Studies have shown that both the informational and affective aspects of news text affect the markets in profound ways, impacting on volumes of trades, stock prices, volatili...

a r t i c l e i n f o Previous literature finds that situations that put managers under significant levels of pressure (e.g. IPO, upcoming credit rating changes, violation of debt covenant, etc.) might affect the way earnings are manipulated. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the pressure caused by the non-temporary level of financial distress, conditions the choice between real a...

This paper proposes a new method for estimating the intergenerational persistence of lifetime earnings from data that contain only short sections of individual earnings histories. The approach infers lifetime earnings persistence from the persistence of short earnings averages together with information about the stochastic process governing individual earnings. I …nd that lifetime earnings are ...

People pay attention to the appearance of others, and personal characteristics can affect many types of decisions. We ask, is there informational value in a face in a situation where trust and reciprocity can increase earnings? We use a laboratory trust game experiment where subjects: are unable to observe a counterpart; must observe a counterpart; or can pay to reveal a counterpart’s photograp...

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 ...

When corporate insiders sell their stock in quantities that deviate from firm-specific trends, their trades are more likely to precede bad news over a horizon of several months, but not in the short run. This is consistent with insiders avoiding “suspicious timing” when engaging into “suspicious amounts” of trading, the combination of which would likely result in Rule 10b-5 securities lawsuits....