The company directors seem to reconcile interests of shareholders and stakeholders before determining the published results. The aim of the paper is to analyse how the risk level could be affected by some governance mechanisms and if the risk is a motivation for earnings management. We identified three types of risk: overall risk, operational risk and financial risk. Our study focused on 222 U.S. firms and covers the 1994-2001 period. The results of an empirical study of U.S. companies indicated that earnings management is positively correlated with the risk, whatever its type, that means that good governance practices tend to decrease the risk. Nevertheless, good practices may differ according to the type of risk. We also found that good practices have a negative impact on earnings management while all types of risk have a positive impact on earnings management.

Mergers operations has currently become one of the key strategies for many firms. It becomes a tool to increase firm value when firm has reached its peak performance. This critical decision expects business performance to improve. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of various governance variables, like managerial ownership, the percentage of shares held by outside directors, the board size, the audit committee size and the percentage of stock options granted to managers, on post merger banks performance and to investigate how the firm size can influence bank performance following mergers operations. It also tends to test the existence of the phenomenon of Empire building which is defined as a primary motivation for mergers operations. Empirical analysis is based on a panel data model applied to a sample of 54 banks come from the list of U.S. bank mergers over a period of 6 years from 2009 to 2015. Our results show that the increase in managerial ownership decreases the value of the deficit, therefore, improves the bank performance following mergers operations. The introduction of firm size shows that this variable is positively correlated with the value of the deficit that is used as a performance measure in this study. Our results converge with previous studies that show an improvement in the performance following bank mergers.

This paper provides a framework of how conditional conservatism contributes to the reduction of creative accounting which in turn affects auditor fees, litigation risk, auditor independence and improved auditing quality. All these factors are reflected in the degree of stakeholders’ confidence in financial reports. The absence of conservatism in the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) conceptual framework is due to its belief that conditional conservatism causes a bias in accounting information and that it compromises neutrality. However, by supporting conservatism with a set of controls including upgraded training, intensified effort of auditors, increased professional skills and activated audit committees, users’ financial statement become more reliable which helps users make the right decisions.

<div><p><em>The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between earnings management, governance and investors </em><em>behavior</em><em>, since this latter can inform about the nature of earnings management and can be considered as a governance mechanism to reduce accounts manipulations. On the basis of a sample of 700 American firms for the period of 1996-2006, our empirical results show that </em><em>investors who take short positions, are able to interpret the information detected from the earnings management. The activity of these investors may be considered as an indicator of the quality of the governance structure and the presence and nature of earnings management. The under-reaction of investors to information leads to short-term sale of the shares of poorly governed firms and characterized by an opportunistic earnings management and to invest in firms well-governed and characterized by an informational earnings management therefore an abnormal profit can be realized.</em></p></div>

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