Earnings management initiatives and selected characteristics of an entity: a case study of the Visegrad Four

Abstract

This paper responds to the current issue of Earnings Management (hereafter EM) initiatives in the Visegrad Four. The aim is to identify EM practices and determine a statistically significant relationship between EM practices and firm size, country, or business sector. The paper contains a literature review, bibliometric analysis, and a description of the methods used in the practical part. Many publications containing the term “EM” in scientific databases, a keyword science map for “EM” publications, a science map of the most cited contributions dealing with EM, a science map of countries with the highest number of cited publications with the term “EM”, and a science map of sources with the highest number of publications with the term “EM” are included. The analysis covers the period from 1900 to 2019. The study is focused on detecting the presence of EM initiatives in the Visegrad Four using the modified Jones model. Results confirmed the EM initiatives in the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, and Hungary. Using the one-way ANOVA test, a statistically significant relationship was confirmed between EM practices and firm size, country, and business sector. The study uses a sample of 250 financial statements of entities from each Visegrad Four country for the year 2018. The sample is adjusted for outliers using the IQR method. AcknowledgmentThis paper was financially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency – Grant No. APVV-17-0546 Variant Comprehensive Model of Earnings Management in Conditions of The Slovak Republic as an Essential Instrument of Market Uncertainty Reduction.

Keywords

• discretionary accruals
• earnings
• earnings management
• modified Jones model
• total accruals