Economic Crisis and Earnings Management: a Statistical Analysis

The financial and real crisis has led to a decline in the confidence towards the financial statements as a tool for representing the actual health status of the companies and it has drawn investors' attention to the financial statement values reliability. This work aims at investigating whether, in the Italian market, the precarious macroeconomic conditions and the consequent difficulties suffered by listed companies have constituted, or not, an incentive to implement earnings management policies manipulations. The large period of time (from 2002 to 2016) allows a mapping of the phenomenon that extends from the period before and after the crisis.