2.1. Incentive or pressure to misreport
2.2. Opportunity
Management has the opportunity to misreport by managing accruals and real activities, as well by other means such as balance sheet or cash flow management. In this study, we focus on the first two because these activities are most directly related to meeting earnings benchmarks. Cohen and Zarowin (2010) and Zang (2012) show that firms use both accruals and real activity earnings management to achieve benchmarks, and make tradeoff between them.