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