The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The next section presents an overview
of prior studies on the association between audit committee and audit quality variables and
earnings management. Next, we develop the hypotheses, followed by a description of the
research design. Finally, we analyze and discuss the empirical findings.
1. LITERATURE REVIEW
Many studies in this topic developed largely from agency theory and examined corporate
governance mechanisms (audit committee and audit quality) as an effective tool in looking for
reduced agency problems between managers and shareholders and align the interests of
management with those of the investors. Accordingly, audit committee and audit quality are
anticipated to enhance a company's reporting quality and specially, constrain earnings
management.
1. 1. Earnings management
Earnings management is a well-documented accounting phenomenon. Schipper (1989)
affirmed that earnings management is the adjustment of a firms’ reported economic
performance by insiders to either mislead a number of stakeholders or to control contractual
outcomes. Similarly, Healy and Wahlen (1999) define occurrence of earnings management as
when managers use judgment in financial reporting and in structuring transactions to alter
financial reports to misrepresent the underlying economic performance of a company or to
influence contractual outcomes that depend on reported accounting numbers. Likewise,
Dechow et al. (2010) observed that higher quality earnings afford additional information of
the features of the financial performance of a firm that is pertinent to a particular decisionmaker
in building a specific decision. As per these diversity definitions, it is obvious that
earnings management is inherently unobservable. Most previous researches employ a variety
of measures of earnings management such as real activities earnings management and accrual
earnings management.
The accrual earnings management is associated to the manipulation through choosing
different accounting procedures and methods selection procedure without modifying in cash
flow, which comply with GAAP (Li et al., 2010). On the other hand, real activities earnings
management is influencing accounting earnings through changing the time of investing
financing, or other operating arrangements, consequently changes the cash flow in order to
influence the financial reporting (Gunny, 2010). According to Roychowdhury (2006),”Real
activities manipulation is defined as departures from normal operational practices, motivated
by managers’ desire to mislead at least some stakeholders into believing certain financial