Earnings management through real activities versus accounting techniques: literature review

Crises and financial scandals have not ceased to recur in the last two decades. A major cause of these facts is earnings management. This research aims to study the explanatory factors and the different techniques of earnings management practices, both through real activities and accounting techniques. For this, we challenge the positive theory of accounting which is based primarily on the observation of accounting practices and not on the identification of 'best' accounting practices. We enrich our analysis by reviewing the main works and models on this topic. In addition, the review of the literature allowed us to note that the majority of previous studies focused on the accounting form of earnings management rather than the real earnings management.