Denna studie har empiriskt undersökt ägarstrukturens påverkan på resultatmanipulation inom den europeiska toppfotbollen. Studiens urval gjordes på 20 av de största fotbollsklubbarna i Europa med avseende på omsättning för perioden 2013-2019. En regressionsmodell upprättades för att studera hur ägarstrukturer påverkar resultatmanipulation. Till regressionsmodellen adderades tre stycken kontrollvariabler. Vid test av regressionsmodellen visades inget signifikant samband mellan storleken på ägarandel hos de tre största ägarnas gemensamma ägarandel. Modellen visade inte heller att fotbollsklubbarnas lönsamhet skulle påverka deras nivåer av resultatmanipulation. Regressionsmodellen kontrollerade även för antal styrelsemedlemmar, vilket visade sig ha en starkt signifikant positiv påverkan på resultatmanipulation. För fotbollsklubbarnas storlek, med avseende på totala tillgångar, visade de sig ha en starkt signifikant negativ påverkan på resultatmanipulation.

My dissertation consists of two essays on CFOs' promotion-based tournament incentives and performance-based equity incentives. The first essay examines the joint implications of CFOs' tournament incentives and equity incentives for firms' risk-taking. With the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO as the proxy for the CFO's tournament incentives, I find that the relationship between a firm's risk taking and the CFO's tournament incentives is non-monotonic. In particular, I show that below a certain level, increase in pay gap is associated with increase in firm risk taking (e.g., higher leverage, lower cash holding balance and higher R&D intensity). However, after reaching a certain level, the CEO-CFO pay gap negatively impacts risk-taking, as increase in pay gap is associated with lower leverage, higher cash holding balance and lower R&D intensity. With the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity as the proxy for the CFO's equity incentives, I find that the CFO's equity incentives negatively impact firm's R&D intensity, but have no significant impact on broader financial decisions such as capital structure and cash policy. Collectively, my findings indicate that CFO incentives play an important role in firm's risk-taking behaviors, and the effect of the CFO's tournament incentives is more pronounced. The second essay studies the impact of tournament incentives and equity incentives for CFOs on firms' earnings management, including accrual-based earnings management (e.g., total accruals, abnormal accruals) and real activities manipulation (e.g., abnormal discretionary expenditures, abnormal production costs). Measuring the CFO's tournament incentives as the pay gap between the CEO and the CFO, I show that the CFO's tournament incentives positively influence total accruals and abnormal accruals. Meanwhile, the CFO's equity incentives, measured as the CFO's pay-performance sensitivity, are found positively related to real activities manipulation proxies and total accruals. My findings show a consistent pattern before and after the passage of SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002), but the incentives' effects on earnings management have become less significant in the post-SOX period. Overall, the CFOs' tournament and equity incentives both play an important role in earnings management, but their relative importance lies in different earnings management techniques.

Enligt god redovisningssed ska redovisning ge en rättvisande bild av den finansiella ställningen hos ett företag. Earnings management är ett samlingsnamn på olika metoder för företagsledningen att manipulera resultatet för att uppnå en önskad effekt. Detta är då ett fenomen som kan utgöra ett hot mot detta och missleda intressenter till att ta felaktiga beslut samt leda till ekonomisk osäkerhet i samhället. Det blir då vitalt att undersöka och kartlägga huruvida förekomsten är utbredd i svenska privata bolag och om det finns en skillnad beroende på vart företagen är placerat.   Denna studie avser att mäta earnings management i måttet diskretionära periodiseringar. Detta mått framtas ur den beprövade modifierade Jones modellen med justering för prestation. Måttet räknas ut i en metod baserad på förändringar i balansräkningen, där kassaflödet från löpande verksamheten spelar en stor roll. I den statistiska modellen kommer även tidigare studerade variabler finnas med för att se hur studien förhåller sig till dessa.   Vårt resultat visar att det finns en skillnad i förekomsten av earnings management hos företagens redovisning, beroende på vart det är placerat. Detta innebär att den geografiska faktorn har en påverkan på kvaliteten av företagens finansiella rapporter i svenska privata bolag. Vi finner att förekomsten av earnings management är mer utbredd bland företag som är placerade i storstadskommuner än företag i landsbygdskommuner. Detta resultat går delvis i linje med den tidigare forskningen som är begränsad och limiterad till noterade bolag.   Denna studies forskningsbidrag består av att ge en ökad förståelse till de geografiska skillnaderna i Sverige och hur de påverkar redovisning och revision. Detta är av intresse för en rad intressenter såsom investerare och reglerare. Tidigare studier har studerat earnings management och geografiska skillnader men detta är den första i vår vetskap som studerar detta i Europa och närmare bestämt Sverige. Sverige är ett land där det finns ett ökat intresse för investeraringar på landsbygden som befinner sig i en expansionsfas. Vi hoppas att denna studie kan ge framtida forskare inspiration till att undersöka fler skillnader mellan stad och landsbygd fast inom andra företagsekonomiska områden och med andra metoder.

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The purpose of this research is to examine whether managers of troubled firms engage in income-increasing earnings management for capital market purposes to maintain a listing on the NASDAQ National Market. Troubled firms are defined as those firms whose share price has fallen below the specified dollar-per-share minimum mandated by the market. The two hypotheses attempt to answer two separate, but interrelated questions: First, do managers of troubled firms engage in earnings management more in periods of distress than in periods of non-distress? And second, do managers of troubled firms engage in earnings management more than similar firms not in jeopardy of delisting? Both a time-series and cross-sectional approach is used to answer these questions. The initial grouping consisted of all NASDAQ National Market firms with a share price of $1 or below at some point during the period from March 1997 through September 2002. The final sample consisted of 215 firms for the time-series analysis and 495 firms for the cross-sectional analysis. Two accrual expectation models were used, including the Jones (1991) and the modified Jones Model (Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney, 1995). The results were unable to confirm that managers engage in this behavior, and similar to the results of DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Skinner (1994), the findings suggest that managers' accounting choices primarily reflect their firms' financial difficulties, rather than attempts to inflate income through discretionary accruals. After controlling for reverse stock splits, dividend reductions, going-concern issues/bankruptcy, and changes in management, the models found significantly negative abnormal accruals. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of possible interpretations for the findings. / Ph. D.

This study examines an aspect of earnings management that I refer to as audit management. I define audit management as a client's strategic use of techniques (e.g., baiting tactics) to prevent auditors from discovering earnings management during the audit. Specifically, I examine whether two baiting tactics, diversionary statements and distracting errors, affect an auditor's ability to uncover an accounting error used to manage earnings. Auditors performed analytical review on financial statements that contained an earnings management error (i.e., an intentional error that results in the client meeting an earnings target). I manipulated whether management provided a diversionary statement that explicitly identified risk in other areas of the audit, and whether management seeded easier, distracting errors into those other areas, both of which were designed to lure the auditor away from the earnings management error. I found that when auditors were intentionally directed to error free accounts they were unlikely to uncover an earnings management error elsewhere in the financial statements. On the other hand, auditors were most accurate in identifying earnings management when they were directed to audit areas that contained distracting errors. These results suggest that managers can use certain baiting tactics to strategically manage the outcome of the audit, but that, in some circumstances, baiting tactics may actually make auditors more likely to uncover managed earnings.

An increase in the prevalence of earnings restatements and cases of financial statement fraud in the early 21st century led to a significant loss of market capitalization and investor confidence in the attestation process. In an effort to restore such confidence, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in July of 2002. The Act significantly increased the penalties for engaging in accrual activities aimed at either misleading users of the financial statements concerning the underlying economic condition of the firm or influencing contractual outcomes. Recent literature separates earnings management into accrual and real activities. Accrual activities include the management of accounts that have not yet been realized in cash, such as receivables and payables. Real activities include the management of actions that deviate from normal business practices, such as price discounts aimed at temporarily increasing sales, excessive inventory production aimed at lowering the cost of goods sold, and aggressively reducing discretionary expenditures such as R&D to improve profit margins. As a result of the increased penalties for engaging in accrual activities, one would expect a relative shift from accrual activities to real activities to facilitate earnings management in the post-SOX period. As with most academic social disciplines, the test employed in my dissertation is a joint test of the sensitivity of the tools available to detect management activities, the research design, and the presence and strength of the effect for which I am searching. This dissertation is the first to test for changes in both accrual quality and real activity-based earnings management in the post-SOX period. In order to test for a change in accrual quality in the post-SOX period, I utilize a model developed by Dechow and Dichev in 2002. The Dechow and Dichev (2002) model of accrual quality is an appropriate measure of accrual information risk, and may therefore be superior to the use of discretionary accrual models to test for an economic effect (Francis et al. 2004). I also utilize three empirical measures of real activity-based earnings management developed by Roychowdhury (2006) to document a change in real earnings management in the post-SOX period. The findings of the study empirically support a change in earnings management techniques in the post-SOX period compared to the pre-SOX period. Specifically, the quality of accruals incorporated into the accounting earnings figure have significantly increased in the post-SOX period. However, instances of earnings management using real activities have also significantly increased in the post-Sox period. These findings inform academics about the power of the tools used in academic accounting research and the overall quality of the argument. They inform users of financial statements about where to direct their attention in reading and evaluating the financials. Finally, they inform regulators, practitioners and policy makers of the effectiveness of the law at improving the quality of accruals, and bring to their attention a potential substitution in the techniques used to manage earnings.

This study investigates the earnings management practices of firms around product recalls. In recent years, the management of earnings around firm-specific events has received considerable attention in the finance and accounting literature. New equity issues, mergers and acquisitions, share repurchases, and management buyouts are some events around which at least some firms have been shown to manage their earnings to achieve managements? objectives. Product recalls offer yet another interesting occasion when managers have incentives to cover up the true financial performance of their firms and mislead investors. In order to determine whether firms announcing product recalls manage earnings more aggressively than non-announcing firms, this study employs the cross-sectional version of the modified Jones (1991) model, as adapted by Teoh, Welch, and Wong (1998 a and b). In order to address the misspecification concern of the model, especially in the context of a performance-related event like product recall, we suggest a modification in the model. We show that the proposed change in the model not only better controls for event-specific working capital changes around recalls, it also increases the explanatory power of the model. Overall, our results suggest that managers tend to manage earnings upwards in quarters immediately preceding and following the recall announcement quarter. We also find weak evidence of downward earnings management in the quarter of recall. These results are in line with the predictions of theoretical models and the findings of past empirical studies in earnings management. The results of our research have important implications for investors and regulators.

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