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Download or read book How Well Do Different Measures of Accounting Conservatism Explain Earnings Management? written by Jonas Gut and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of this thesis is on the measurement of earnings management and in particular on the measurement of accounting conservatism. One of its main contributions is an overview showing which recent empirical studies apply which measures of conservatism, indicating the metrics' relative importance and their status among researchers. In the second part, I test three of these measures - the market-to-book ratio, nonoperating accruals, and total accruals - for their ability to explain earnings management proxied by discretionary accruals obtained from the Modified Jones Model. I find that the explanatory power of the total accruals measure is the highest, followed by the nonoperating accruals measure and the market-to-book ratio. Other results implicate that a higher level of conservatism usually has a positive (negative) influence on income-decreasing (-increasing) earnings management and that the influence of conservatism on income-decreasing earnings management is stronger than on income-increasing earnings management. Thereby, this part of my thesis links previous findings on the interaction between accounting conservatism and earnings management to several measures (or calculation modes) of the two phenomena and enables a better understanding of their functionality.