The Effects of Taxes, Agency Costs and Information Asymmetry on Earnings Management: A Comparison of Public and Private Firms

The realization of securities gains and losses to manage earnings in publicly-traded bank holding companies has been documented in a large number of studies, but very little is known about why managers engage in this behavior. Two possible explanations for earnings management put forth by Warfield, Wild, and Wild (1995) are that managers engage in this behavior either to circumvent accounting-based contracts designed to mitigate agency problems, or to reduce information asymmetry.