Factors Influencing Earnings Management in Sri Lanka
Asanga Jayawardhana,
Central Queensland University, Australia
Abstract
Earnings management can be influenced by a number of factors that need to be analysed further to find out how influential they are and also how exactly they influence. In order to conduct a systematic review of available literature on the topic of factors influencing earnings management, specifically in the context of companies and firms in Sri Lanka, a search methodology was devised and applied to the online search engine ‘Google Search’. From here, results were narrowed down in a systematic manner. First, only scholarly articles were isolated using Google’s Scholarly Articles filter. Second, article beyond the first few pages were eliminated due to constraints of space and time. Third and last, articles pertaining the specific topic at hand as well as the narrow geographical context of Sri Lanka were chosen. This resulted in five articles being selected for further analysis. Analysis showed that there were a number of factors studied that had correlations to the degree of earnings management practices in Sri Lankan companies. The systematic review also showed that there remains a significant scope for further study and research to fill in the gaps of existing literature.