Auditing, Earnings Management, Governance

Corporate managers have considerable discretion over how financial results are reported, and a long line of research examines the conditions under which that discretion is used to inform investors versus to obscure the true performance of a firm. Audit committees, external auditors, and governance structures such as board composition act as checks on opportunistic reporting, yet their effectiveness varies in ways that researchers are still working to explain. The global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards has introduced new opportunities to study whether common rules produce genuinely comparable accounting quality across different legal and institutional environments, or whether local incentives simply reshape how earnings are managed rather than reducing it. Open questions include how information asymmetry between managers and outside investors interacts with disclosure practices, and how analyst scrutiny changes the calculus firms face when deciding how aggressively to manage reported numbers.

Works

128,059

Total citations

2,157,164

Keywords

Earnings ManagementFinancial ReportingAudit CommitteeAccounting QualityCorporate GovernanceAccruals Quality