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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the monitoring role exerted by large institutional investors and their ability to restrict the earnings management practices conducted around seasoned equity offerings (SEOs).

The sample includes 130 French SEOs by non-regulated firms during 2004-2015. The authors used various cross-section, univariate and multivariate tests using several proxies for earnings management. They attempt to highlight that firms issuing SEOs are more able to manage earnings around SEOs owing to the predominance of large speculative institutional investors. Noteworthy, the monitoring role exerted by sophisticated institutional investors turns out to restrict the earnings management opportunities surrounding a SEOs event.

The results show that the issuing firms tend to manipulate earnings in an upward trend with respect to the year preceding the SEO offer. Thus, a special attention has been drawn on the fact that the issuing companies strive to prove their ability to manage earnings around SEOs in presence of large speculative institutional investors.

The results provide useful insights into the role different types of institutional investors play in terms of enhancing both governance and accounting information quality.

This paper adds to the literature questioning the evidence that institutional investor activism frequently engage in misleading earnings management around corporate events. The authors provide an alternative explanation for earnings management around SEOs in the French context.