Table 1contains a comparison of manipulators’ financial characteristics with those of industry-matched controls in the fiscal year prior to the year that contained the public disclosure of the earnings manipulation. In the prior year,
manipulators were smaller (when size was measured either in terms of total assets or in terms of sales), less profitable, and more leveraged than control companies. Manipulators also experienced higher growth. The median sales growth of manipulators (34.4 percent) is significantly larger than that of controls (9.4 percent), which raises the ques-tion: Is growth exogenous to earnings manipulation or a result of manipulation? I found that in the year prior to the fiscal year of manipulation, manipulators also had significantly higher growth than nonmanipulators (medians were 29.4 percent versus 10.6 percent), which suggests that growth originates exogenously. This profile of manipulators as companies with high-growth prospects could explain why I found manipulators to have, on aver-age, lower total assets than control companies but similar market values of equity.