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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics on the earnings management examined by the discretionary accruals.

The sample includes 151 French firms listed on the CAC ALL shares index from 2006 to 2015. The paper uses the feasible generalized least square regression technique to test the relationship between CEO characteristics and earnings management.

Using discretionary accruals as a proxy for earnings management, the results obtained from the three models (Jones modified 1995; Kothari et al., 2005; Raman and Shahrur, 2008) indicated that there is a positive and significant relationship between CEO duality, CEO nationality and the quality of financial communication. However, no significant relationship was found between CEO board member, CEO turnover and earnings management.

A literature review finds that fewer studies have investigated the relationship between earnings management practices and personal CEO characteristics in the French context. Furthermore, no study yet has examined the influence of CEO nationality and CEO age on earnings management practices. This study provides empirical data about the impact of CEO’s characteristics on earnings management and how these different characteristics can facilitate the transition to manipulate and influence the quality of financial communication.

The purpose of this paper is to provide initial evidence on the association between environmental initiatives and earnings management. Prior literature documents firms participating in environmental initiatives to report relatively stronger financial performance. Moreover, firms with superior performance have been shown to engage in greater levels of earnings management. A natural question that arises is to what extent do firms with environmental initiatives engage in earnings management to report better financial performance?

The study draws on two theoretical frameworks, external monitoring and internal corporate culture, to predict an inverse association between environmental initiatives and earnings management. The authors test this prediction using an earnings management regression model, estimating discretionary accruals using the modified-Jones approach.

The study finds that firms with environmental initiatives exhibit lower earnings management proxied by absolute and income-increasing total discretionary accruals. The authors further find pollution prevention and climate related initiatives to help explain this inverse association. The results imply that firms practising environmental responsibility report better financial performance, with the most likely reason being due to real economic performance rather than through earnings management techniques.

This study provides initial evidence on the association between environmental initiatives and earnings management, an area of importance to all stakeholders in a market with increasing interest in corporate environmental performance and its implications.

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the Greek firms' earnings management policies compared with debt, taxation and the financial crisis.

In this paper, the authors show that existed measures of real earnings management, whether corrected for performance or not, rely crucially on strong assumptions. The authors provide a novel modelling that permits panel structure so as to correct for heterogeneity across firms while permitting to determine endogenously the number of underlying firm-groups in the data generating process.

The empirical results indicate that Greek firms are likely to reduce earnings manipulation activities when they face liquidity risk. Taxation and financial crisis have a negative and positive effect on earnings management, respectively.

The effect of debt, taxation and financial crisis on earnings management has never been investigated in Greece. The empirical results offer valuable information to shareholders and investors as they can understand how some main factors, such as debt, taxation and financial crisis, influence firm's accounting practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Japanese private placement issuers manipulate their earnings around the time of issuance and the relationship between earnings management and the post‐issue stock underperformance.

Cross‐sectional modified Jones model is used to measure earnings management proxy – discretionary accruals. Control firms are developed to mitigate the impact of other factors on the measurement of earnings management. Different set of control firms is also developed to calculate abnormal stock returns.

It is found that managers of Japanese private placement issuers tend to engage in income‐increasing earnings management around the time of the issuance. It is further speculated that earnings management serves as a likely source of investor overoptimism at the time of private placements. To support this speculation, evidence is found suggesting that the income‐increasing accounting accruals made at the time of private placements predict the post‐issue long‐term stock underperformance.

The study contributes to the large body of literature on earnings manipulation around the time of securities issuance.

This study aims to address the unanswered question of whether corporate sustainability has an impact on auditors’ overall judgment and to provide incremental evidence that corporate sustainability reporting has significant effect on financial auditors’ judgment.

Following prior research, the authors, respectively, apply auditors’ decisions on going-concern opinions and three discretionary accrual measures as proxies for auditor conservatism over financial risk and financial reporting risk. The authors collect corporate sustainability reporting and sustainability assurance data of U.S. firms from the global reporting initiative (GRI) database to construct and measure firms’ sustainability reporting activities.

The authors find that nonreporting firms are more likely to receive going-concern opinions than the reporting firms. In addition, reporting firms have a larger scale of discretionary accruals than their nonreporting counterparts. The authors also obtain consistent findings that sustainability assurance or accounting assurance providers strengthen the effect of sustainability reporting on auditors’ judgment.

First, using discretionary accruals as measures of auditor conservatism is controversial, as accruals are the joint product by auditors and clients. Second, binary variables as a measure of sustainability reporting activities limit the inference. Lastly, the findings based on limited samples may weaken the external validity.

The findings imply that firms engaging in sustainability activities are lower in financial or financial reporting risk. Firms can influence audit practitioners’ overall judgment through sustainability reports. Sustainability commitments and reporting have become a part of firms’ risk management.

The findings imply that sustainability reporting could become an integrated part of regulated corporate disclosure. Sustainability assurance reduces social costs by lending credibility to sustainability reports.

This paper provides incremental evidence that sustainability reports provide useful information and signals that influence auditors’ professional judgment. The findings also suggest that sustainability assurance strengthens auditors’ confidence in using sustainability information, thus amplifying the effect of sustainability reporting on auditors’ judgment.

Auditing studies have shifted the research focus from the audit firm level to the individual audit partner level in recent years. Motivated by the call from Lennox and Wu (2018) to explore the effect of audit partners’ characteristics on audit quality in the US, this study aims to develop a new measure of engagement partner workload (EPW), which includes both the size and number of clients audited to test the effect of EPW on audit quality. This study also examines the moderating effect of the partner firm size on audit quality.

To test the effect of the EPW on audit quality, this study runs multivariate regressions of EPW on each specific client’s discretionary accruals and audit report delays. This study also runs a logistic regression of EPW on clients’ probability of having small profit increases to meet performance benchmarks.

Results of the hypotheses show that partner workload is positively related to audit quality. The results indicate that partners with larger, but fewer, clients conduct higher quality audits. Further analysis indicates that the relationship between partner workload and audit quality only holds for partners from the non-Big 4 firms.

This study contributes to the literatures of both audit quality and audit partner characteristics, and the results complement initial research aimed at identifying US partner-related characteristics that influence audit quality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the relationships between CEO stock option compensation and earnings management.Design/methodology/approach – Regression of CEO stock option compensation and other factors on measures of discretionary accruals.Findings – A positive relationship between CEO stock option compensation and discretionary accruals was found, implying that earnings management is more likely where stock options are a larger part of CEO compensation. Earnings management is found to be moderated in large firms with stock option compensation and the relationship between stock options and earnings management has intensified in recent years. It was also found that stock options exacerbate earnings management in firms with growth opportunities.Research limitations/implications – Beyond the scope of this paper, these findings raise the following questions: What does the evidence of a size effect mean? Does it reflect information asymmetry, governance, external monitoring, or political risk? Why has the stock option effect on earnings management become more pronounced in recent years? Is it possible to mitigate the negative effects of option compensation on earnings management through the presence of stronger governance structures? Is it possible to mitigate the negative effects of option compensation on earnings management through the presence stronger governance structures? There are implications for compensation policies for corporate executives.Originality/value – This paper extends prior research on the relationship between CEO stock option compensation and earnings management. It provides new insight into the factors affecting this relationship.

This study aims to explore corporate earnings management practices in Australia and New Zealand before and after the regulatory changes and corporate governance reforms. The study argues that the effectiveness of regulatory reforms has to be reflected in constraining earnings management in post-reform period as compared to pre-reform period.

Using a sample of 3,966 firm-year observations, including all ASX and NZX listed firms for the period 2001-2006, the study examines earnings management practices in both countries in pre- and post-reform periods with appropriate statistical methods.

The results indicate some interesting phenomenon: the magnitude of earnings management did not decline after the governance reform as a positive time trend is observed in the entire sample as well as in Australian and New Zealand sub-samples, suggesting that earnings management has been growing over time. Additional test indicates no structural change has occurred before and after the new regulations. The shifting from decreasing earnings management to increasing earnings management can be interpreted as an evidence that earnings become more ‘informative’ in a more transparent disclosure regime to capture short-run benefits from regulator reforms.

The shifting of earnings management behaviour from decreasing to increasing income can be interpreted as the outcome of more “informative”, rather than “deliberate”, earnings management in a more transparent disclosure regime to capture short-run benefits of regulatory reforms, which is worth further investigation. The findings of the study can lead regulatory authorities taking appropriate measures to promote earnings quality in corporate financial reporting from a long-run decision usefulness context. Any future reforms should be directed to protecting the interest of stakeholders as well as ensuring benefits outweighing costs for them.

The findings of the study can lead regulatory authorities in taking appropriate measures to promote earnings quality in corporate financial reporting from a long-run decision usefulness context.

The study adds value to the existing earnings management literature as well as effectiveness of regulations for the benefit of wider stakeholder groups.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the phenomenon of earnings management in the Egyptian initial public offerings (IPO) market where most of the IPOs were the privatisations of state‐owned enterprises (SOEs).

Using a sample of 59 Egyptian IPOs, the extent of earnings management was computed using a modified cross‐sectional version of Jones’ model.

The initial results do not provide support for the hypothesis that Egyptian IPO firms tend to overstate their earnings before the IPO date. However, when the sample firms were classified under two groups based on the pre‐IPO discretionary accruals, the results illustrate that most privately‐owned companies were found among those which contemplate to aggressively manage earnings upwards in order to maximise the IPO proceeds, whereas privatised public enterprises were found with no systematic pattern of earnings manipulation. The results also demonstrate that pre‐offering discretionary accruals do not explain the post‐offering underperformance in earnings but predict a portion of the subsequent poor share returns performance.

The findings could be of assistance to all those involved in IPOs, such as the regulatory authorities and the primary and secondary market investors.

With a few exceptions, most of the literature on earnings management has been based on the US data. Therefore, it is hoped that undertaking a research in a country such as Egypt, where the shareholding structures of most Egyptian IPO companies were concentrated in the hands of the state before going public, may reveal a different perception of earnings management and help determine whether this setting would lead to a higher or lower propensity for earnings management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the contracting incentives (i.e. bonus plans, debt covenants, political costs hypotheses), and income smoothing can explain accounting choices in an emerging country, Egypt.

The paper uses the ordinary least square regression model to examine the relationship between earnings management and reporting objectives. A sample of 438 non-financial firms listed on the Egyptian Exchange over the period 2005-2007 is used.

The paper finds that the contracting objectives explain little of the variations in accounting choices (i.e. discretionary accruals) in the Egyptian context. However, the paper finds that mangers are likely to smooth the reported earnings by managing the accrual component in an attempt to reduce the fluctuation in reported earnings by increasing (decreasing) earnings when earnings are low (high) in attempt to reduce the variability of the reported earnings.

The empirical results rely on the ability of earnings management proxies to adequately capture earnings manipulation activities.

The findings of the study should be of substantial interest to regulators and policy makers. The results implicitly contribute to the ongoing argument in relation to the optimal flexibility permitted by standard setting and the argument that tightening the accounting standards and mandating International Financial Reporting Standards are likely to improve reporting quality and reduce opportunistic earnings management. The results reveal that many of the weaknesses related to corporate reporting in emerging countries may result from the inadequate enforcement of the law and the weak legal protection of minority shareholders. The results also highlight the crucial role of understanding the reporting incentives, which is mainly shaped by institutional and market forces and the legal environment, in explaining accounting choices.

Unlike previous studies that tested an individual objective, this study examines the trade-offs among various reporting objectives in an emerging economy.