Does quarterly earnings guidance increase or reduce earnings management?

This study adds to the earnings guidance debate by investigating whether quarterly guidance is related to two forms of earnings management: (1) benchmark beating and (2) accounting irregularities. Using a post-Regulation Fair Disclosure sample, I find that firms regularly issuing earnings guidance display a discontinuity around zero in their distribution of management forecast errors and a larger discontinuity in their distribution of analyst forecast errors compared to non-guiding firms. Multivariate tests reveal that guiding firms recognize large abnormal accruals to beat their own guidance, but not to beat analyst forecasts, whereas non-guiding firms do recognize large abnormal accruals to beat analyst forecasts. Overall, guiding firms and non-guiding firms use similar levels of abnormal accruals to beat benchmarks. I also find no statistical relation between quarterly guidance and the likelihood of accounting irregularities. In sum, the evidence shows that while guiding firms and non-guiding firms manage earnings to different benchmarks, they are similar in terms of their aggregate earnings management.