The Relationship between Earnings Benchmarks and Earnings Management across the Stages of a Listed Egyptian Firm’s Life Cycle

Firms have different stages in their life that have various characteristics and required different strategies. Therefore, firms may apply different tools of earnings management techniques to achieve specific earnings benchmarks through their life cycle. The purpose of the current study is to examine relationship between the firm’s life cycle, earnings management and earnings benchmarks in the Egyptian environment. By using a sample of non-financial Egyptian listed firms from 2016 to 2019, the study constructs ten models of panel data regression analysis to test the hypotheses. The descriptive results indicates that most of the Egyptian firms are in the decline stages and achieve various earnings benchmarks across the various stages of life cycle. Further, Egyptian firms apply more than on tools of earnings management for all stages of their life cycle. The empirical findings illustrate that each stage of the life cycle for Egyptian firms has an impact on the earnings attributes and all stages except mature stage- are engaged in earnings management tools. In addition, the findings provide evidence for the impact of earnings management tools on earning benchmarks across the various stages of Egyptian firm life cycle. The paper contributes to the literature through considering the interrelated relationship between firm’s life cycle, earnings management tools, and earnings benchmarks which not examined widely in prior studies.