SUMMARY The accuracy and other properties of analyst earnings forecasts represent potentially useful proxies for the impact of audit quality on client financial reports. Extant research in the auditing literature, however, is characterized by diametrically opposite predictions and inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between audit quality and analyst forecast accuracy. We argue that a potential reason for the inconsistency in the literature reflects these studies' focus on end-of-year forecast accuracy, which is subject to competing effects of audit quality. High-quality auditors may simultaneously improve forecast accuracy through their impact on the decision usefulness of clients' prior period reports, and reduce forecast accuracy by constraining client attempts to manage earnings in the direction of the consensus forecast. We argue and present evidence in support of the conjecture that analysts' beginning-of-year forecasts are a superior metric for identifying the impact of audit quality on the properties of analyst forecasts because the decision usefulness effect of audit quality should be dominant with respect to those forecasts. Data Availability: Data are available from sources identified in the article.

Using a panel of listed Australian firms for the years 1999-2007, this paper investigates whether analysts' forecast efficiency is improved by the occurrence of a publicly observable event, such as a CEO appointment, which signals a firm's earnings management incentives. Two supporting hypotheses are also tested: first, that CEO appointments are associated with income-decreasing earnings management; and second, that analyst forecast errors increase with the level of earnings management present in current period financial statements. Consistent with prior literature, we find income-decreasing earnings management in the year of CEO appointment. Earnings management, as a general phenomenon, is found to be significantly related to analyst forecast errors in the period in which the earnings management occurs. However, we present evidence that analyst forecasts for current year earnings are significantly more accurate with respect to earnings management in cases where a CEO is appointed during the current financial period.

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Research Question/Issue: Earnings management is often perceived as a typical response to managers' short-term objectives at the expense of long-term benefits. However, this is not aligned with the most recent development in corporate reporting-integrated reporting (IR)-which encourages long-term orientation and a trustworthy, honest, and ethical corporate culture. We thus examine whether firms practicing IR to a greater extent exhibit lower levels of earnings management.Research Findings/Insights: Using multiple IR measures and an international sample of 19,926 firm-year observations from 2008 to 2015, we document that while firms practicing IR engage in less accrual-based earnings management, they do resort to real activities earnings management. Such opportunistic earnings management behavior is most pronounced when firms' incentive to manage earnings is high. We also show that opportunistic earnings management behavior is moderated in countries and regions where IR is mandatory, where capital markets are more developed, and where financial reporting is less frequent.Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our study contributes to the growing literature on whether IR is an effective governance tool in constraining earnings management behavior. The results show that the institutional environment plays an essential role in enabling corporate reporting initiatives such as IR to affect substantive internal changes rather than being used opportunistically.Practitioner/Policy Implications: Firms that practice IR to a greater extent are associated with a lower level of earnings management in countries where IR is mandatory, which contributes to the policy debate on mandating IR.

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