We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analystsbased unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as ‘‘pseudo’’ targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and ...

This study examines whether firms just above and just below three earnings benchmarks (loss avoidance, earnings changes, and analyst forecast) have differing levels of discretionary accruals. If discretionary accruals are a measure of earnings management, then firms above (benchmark beaters) and firms below a benchmark should have differing levels of discretionary accruals. Dechow et al. (2003)...

OBJECTIVE To rank 39 surgical procedures in order of variation of inpatient surgical rates, according to a new index of variation and to test the hypothesis that there is greater variation for primarily discretionary operations than for primarily non-discretionary operations. DESIGN A population-based retrospective cohort study. SETTING Nine provinces (99.19% of Canada's population). PART...

A decade ago in a paper, “Reassessing Discretionary Fiscal Policy,” published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I concluded that “in the current context of the US economy, it seems best to let fiscal policy have its main countercyclical impact through the automatic stabilizers ... It would be appropriate in the current circumstances for discretionary fiscal policy to be saved explicitly ...

BACKGROUND Accountable care organizations (ACOs) seek to reduce growth in healthcare spending while ensuring high-quality care. We hypothesized that accountable care organization implementation would selectively limit the use of discretionary cardiovascular care (defined as care occurring in the absence of indications such as myocardial infarction or stroke), while maintaining high-quality care...

We consider a model of strategic information transmission in which a firm can communicate its quality to consumers through informative advertising. Our main result is that informative advertising claims can be credible even when the firm faces consumers with ex ante homogeneous preferences. A fundamental assumption of our model is that whether the product is available for purchase is independen...

The study is an effort to fiind out the impact of earnings management on dividend payout policy for two coutries that is Pakistan and China. A set of listed Companies in both of the countries have been investigated to analyze the relationship for the year 2003 to 2007 in Pakistan and 2001 to 2007 in China. Dividend policy has been measured by dividend payout. Whereas earnings management has bee...

This study examines the role of pre-IPO discretionary accruals in the valuation and underpricing of IPOs. We find that IPO offer price is unaffected whereas market closing price is positively associated with the levels of pre-IPO discretionary accruals for issuers with aggressively reported earnings. We also find that this relative over-valuation of managed earnings by the markets explains a po...