“…Past research discussed the effect of earnings management on the future earnings and stock market performance, either using accrual-based methods (Rangan, 1998;Teoh et al, 1998;DuCharme et al, 2004;Lim et al, 2008) or real-activities manipulations (Graham et al, 2005;Cohen et al, 2008;Gunny, 2010;Kothari et al, 2016;Jiang et al, 2018). The knowledge about the target firm's future performance can be taken into consideration by investors in their attempt to determine the intrinsic value of each security in order to identify investment opportunities (Kenourgios et al, 2021). Louis (2004) verified the negative impact of accruals earnings management on the acquirer's underperformance, while Farooqi et al (2017) EMJB 18,4 confirmed that real earnings management reversals are negatively related to acquiring firm's performance.…”