4. Financial Crisis as a Major Cause of Earnings Management: Theoretical Background and Literature Review

This chapter approaches the question of the relationship between financial crisis and earnings management. It presents a review of studies that identified financial crisis as a major cause of earnings management. Previous research on the impact of financial crisis on managers’ earnings management behavior has yielded ambiguous results, depicting different scenarios depending on the choice of firm context/type, and on the start date of the financial crisis. The results show that there is a lack of consensus on the direction and magnitude of earnings management in times of recession. Results of the performed literature review will be operationalized into a hypothesis presented in the following Chap. 5. Therefore, this chapter is essentially propaedeutic to Chap. 5.