Title: Do characteristics of audit committees and board of directors influence earnings management?

Authors: Jagdish Pathak; Khondkar E. Karim; SangHyun Suh; Ziwen Zhang

Addresses: Odette School of Business, University of Winsor, Winsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada ' Robert J. Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854, USA ' Robert J. Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854, USA ' Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

Abstract: Earnings management has attracted much attention in this globalised economic environment due to large accounting scandals such as Enron and WorldCom. National governments and other market-regulation institutions are taking measures to restrain earnings management in order to ensure the reliability and transparency of financial reporting. This study explores whether audit committees and boards of directors influence earnings management using the literary review method. The findings show that both discretionary accruals and abnormal accruals are mostly used as dependent variables to detect earnings manipulation estimated by the Jones and modified Jones models. For the most part, evidence from previous literature indicates that the more independent the members of the audit committee and board, the higher the quality of earnings in financial reporting. However, some opposite findings exist.

Keywords: earnings management; audit committee independence; board of directors; BODs; discretionary accruals; modified Jones model; audit committees.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMDM.2014.065353

International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 2014 Vol.13 No.4, pp.356 - 379

Received: 24 Feb 2014
Accepted: 26 Apr 2014
Published online: 14 Nov 2014 *

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