Some of the firms that meet or just beat prior year's earnings accomplish this outcome by engaging in upward earnings management, so it can be argued that the underlying performance that they would have otherwise reported would have been lower, which would have a commensurately higher Fog. That is, all else equal, the readability for the underlying performance is lower than for the reported performance. However, management discussion is unlikely to dwell on the underlying and unreported performance, particularly if management has engaged in earnings management to meet/beat the benchmark. Rather, management will discuss the earnings as presented, which is earnings that met or beat the past year's level. In any case, this ontological effect, if it exists in our research context, would be small because our analysis focuses on a small range of earnings (i.e., earnings changes close to zero).