The impact of financial statement comparability on earnings management: Evidence from frontier markets

This paper aims to examine whether financial statement comparability constrains opportunistic earnings management in frontier market countries. From a large sample of 19 frontier market countries, across several accounting standards, results show that enhanced financial comparability constrains accruals earnings management (AEM). Contrary to developed markets and novel to this study, a significant relationship between financial comparability and real earnings management (REM) was not found.