الملخص

This study seeks to understand the potential heterogeneous effects of corporate social responsibility on earnings management. Theoretical explanations for these effects tend to support both positive and negative effects, with different degree of assertiveness, while empirical studies align with the theoretical explanations in providing contradictory findings. We find that corporate social disclosure does in general restrict the size of discretionally accruals. This effect is larger in the upper part of the conditional distribution of discretionary accruals. In other words, firms that overuse discretionary accruals are disproportionally more constrained in their ability to continue to do so compared to firms that less often employ such practices. Furthermore, for the firms which apply relatively modest amount for earnings management, this constraining effect does not appear at all. Interestingly the effects of other determinants of earnings management seem to follow the same broadly defined pattern.

The term of earnings management is sometimes used in literature as a synonym for accounting reporting fraud. Thereby, this paper aims to review the existing literature to offer a better clarification to the primary characteristics and differentiation between earnings management and accounting reporting fraud. The results of other previous studies have been reviewed to demonstrate the results of this study using a number of alternatives available resources to the collection of the relevant literature. The findings demonstrate that the activities of manipulating financial information continue to prevail in the business environment worldwide, despite the fact that there are strict laws and regulations to prevent earnings management and fraud behaviour. Therefore, defining the motivation of managers manipulative behaviour can enable academics and regulators to establish a framework to distance between earnings management and fraud and to recognize fraudulent actions through attempting to pursue how managers act to achieve their objectives.

Earnings management could be considered as a matter ofserious concernby the financial accounting literature. Several approaches for detecting earnings management have been provided by the previous studies. This study aimsto review the different approaches used to identify earnings management and makes a critical evaluation on the weaknesses and strengths of these methods. Despite the fact that accrual-based earnings management is the most widely used approach for detecting earnings management, it has a number of drawbacks. We have attempted to shed more light on the strengths and drawbacks that should be considered when identifying earnings management behaviour.

Financial information manipulation has been one of the most important issues since the failure of major corporations worldwide such as Enron, World.Com, Arthur Anderson and others. Although, these companies differ in their core and operations, they share the same causes for their failure, which is really the practice of financial information manipulation. These manipulation activities are commonly referred to as "creative accounting." However, the concept of creative accounting is sometimes used as a synonym for accounting fraud in literature. Thereby, this research aims to review the existing literature in order to shed more light on the main features of creative accounting and accounting fraud, as well as the distinctions between them. In doing so, the findings of other prior studies, using a range of alternative available resources to gather the related literature, were reviewed to present the results of this research. The main findings of this research suggest that professional accountants and companies‘ executives are still able to find loopholes in the existing accounting standards to manipulate financial reports. In addition, it is still difficult to establish a framework that incorporates all the considerations that are essential to distinguish between creative accounting and accounting fraud. To overcome

on this phenomenon, the potential solution is by identifying executives‘ motivations to engage in manipulation behaviour, which can enable academics and regulators to establish a framework for distancing them, as well as may help to identify fraudulent actions by pursuing how executives behave to achieve their goals and intentions.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether and how Serbian companies manage earnings to avoid losses and to avoid earnings decreases. The empirical evidence found in this study shows that there is a discontinuity in the distribution of reported earnings around the zero earnings benchmark suggesting that Serbian companies engage in earnings management to avoid reporting losses. Furthermore, this continuity disappears when we subtracted discretionary accruals from reported earnings indicating that Serbian companies use discretionary accruals as a tool for earnings management. However, the distribution of earnings does not provide evidence that Serbian companies manage earnings to avoid earnings decreases. These results are robust to alternative methods of scaling earnings and various ways of estimating discretionary accruals.

Purpose

The paper aims to re-interpret the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in limiting the extreme practices in earnings management (EM) by using evidence from large UK companies.

Design/methodology/approach

The study has used content analysis and disclosure index to measure the level of CSR. The authors measured EM based on discretionary accruals by using cross-sectional version of the modified Jones model.

Findings

The findings of this study reveal that companies with a higher commitment to CSR activities are less likely to manage earnings through accruals.

Originality/value

This study shed more light on the potential impact of CSR on earnings management in the context of the UK. Prior research on the impact of CSR on earnings management has used exclusively CSR scores, provided by CSR score indices. The manual measurement used in this study for CSR (disclosure index/content analysis) is considered to provide a more detailed and precise measure.

The ethics of financial reporting assumes a center stage in the corporate world in the background of an emerging understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We review the literature on the link between earnings management (EM) and CSR and reveal that there are two contradictory perspectives. One perspective assumes that EM is negatively associated to CSR, while the other argues that EM and CSR are positively related. These perspectives are based on the competitive existence theories such as agency, singling, stakeholder, legitimacy theories. While, the negative relationship between EM and CSR perspective is in line with the legitimacy, agency and singling theories, the positive relationship is in accordance with stakeholder theory.

Since the gender diversity of boards and reporting of earnings are two most debated issues in the corporate world, the paper examined how the presence of women directors on the corporate board influence earnings management practices. We found that firms with a higher number of female and independent female directors are adopting restrained earnings management practices in the UK. We further made a distinction between complex (high debt) and simple (low debt) companies, and the outcomes reveal that female directors have a positive effect on the earnings management in simple companies. The paper contributes to the debate on gender diversity on boards, and its impact on the use of accounting discretion in financial reporting.