Earning management and delisting risk of initial public offerings. Working paper. http://ssrn.com/abstract=641021

Earnings management is a corporate decision subject to costs. Both earnings management in the IPO process and the ex ante delisting risk of newly issued firms are related to firm fundamentals. With a sample of IPOs from 1980 to 1999, we find that the degree of earnings management possesses significant predictive power on IPO failure. IPO firms associated with aggressive earnings management are more likely to delist for performance failure, and tend to delist sooner. Furthermore, we find that IPO firms associated with conservative earnings management are more likely to be merged or acquired and they earn positive abnormal returns. Our results also show that IPO issuers manage earnings in response to market demand. Market-wide earnings management of IPO firms interacts with the IPO cycle documented by Lowry and Schwert (2002)