Abstract:

Earnings management has garnered significant attention from researchers, regulators, and other stakeholders interested in the quality of financial information. This article employs a bibliometric analysis based on articles indexed in the Scopus database from 2002 to 2024 to provide an overview of the relationship between corporate governance and earnings management. The research on corporate governance and earnings management has experienced growth, with 56% of the literature from the past 22 years produced in the last six years, between 2018 and 2024, peaking at 42 articles in 2022. Chandren, S. is recognized as one of the authors who has significantly contributed to the literature with five publications, while Al-Haddad, L. holds the highest number of citations, with 146 citations for four articles. Active contributors to research on earnings management and corporate governance primarily hail from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Malaysia. Furthermore, this article addresses four approaches to earnings management: transparency, the quality of financial information and accounting manipulations, corporate governance mechanisms and earnings management, corporate governance and earnings management in commercial banks, and the relationship between managerial behavior and earnings management. Finally, this article proposes research avenues for future researchers, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the effect of audit committee characteristics on earnings management, such as financial expertise, audit committee independence, and gender diversity, particularly in emerging countries. It is essential to focus on real earnings management rather than accounting earnings management and to consider other factors that may affect earnings management, such as family ownership, religiosity, and institutional ownership.