Earnings management: Implications and controversies

In April 2007, after five years of hard work, we submitted our book, Earnings Management: Emerging Insights in Theory, Practice, and Research, to Springer’s Series in Accounting Scholarship. Initially, we expected to follow the footsteps of Ronen and Sadan (1981) and write a short manuscript focusing on the developments in earnings management since 1981. We soon realized, however, that the volume of research on this topic had expanded dramatically, so we changed the year cutoff to 1990, and the final product is a 623-page book. The references list alone is 123 pages long, covering over 2,000 citations. Since our goal was to maximize the longevity of the book’s relevance, we made the decision to include yet unpublished working papers.