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Stock Liquidity, Price Informativeness, And Accruals-Based Earnings Management, Jing Fang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

We examine the effect of stock liquidity on accruals-based earnings management. Finance literature suggests that stock liquidity leads to price efficiency. If prices are efficient, more future earnings should be reflected in current prices. Therefore, gain from shifting accruals across periods should be low and managers should have less incentive to manage earnings. We find that higher stock liquidity is associated with higher future earnings response coefficient and lower accruals-based earnings management. Our finding has important implication for the decline in accruals-based earnings management during 2001-2005 documented in prior study. Our additional trend analysis suggests that instead of SOX and …