3. Research Design and Data
3.1 Proxies for Earnings Management
Our hypotheses call for measures that directly capture the extent to which firms use
reporting discretion to make earnings more informative about the underlying economic
performance. However, both firms’ use of discretion and the resulting informativeness of
earnings are difficult to measure. A firm’s true economic performance is unobservable,
and we do not have stock prices for private firms, which could serve as a benchmark. We
therefore focus on the level of earnings management. Conceptually, earnings management
is the extent to which firms’ use reporting discretion to reduce the informativeness of
earnings and, hence, an inverse proxy for our theoretical construct.8 Moreover, earnings
management proxies should be particularly responsive to the use of discretion and firms’
reporting incentives, making our tests more powerful. Finally, we can draw on prior
research in constructing several measures of earnings management (e.g., Healy and
Wahlen, 1999; Dechow and Skinner, 2000).