Earnings Manipulation among the Main Industrial Sectors. Evidence from Italy

This paper examines the risk of earnings manipulation among the Stock Italian Companies (“Società per Azioni”) in the main industrial sectors. The companies have been selected from the leading industrial sectors (textile, food, clothing, automotive and metallurgic) which have been generating relevant revenue streams over the past decades. These industry sectors have considered the ones who have driven the Italian Economy. By collecting financial data from AIDA database, we test the existence of Earnings Manipulation within Stock Italian Companies using the Beneish Model (Manipulation Score). The analysis conducted to those companies shows that the application of the model brings to the following interpretation: by using the threshold-limit of -1.78 (Beneish et al., 2013) a half of the companies analyzed has a low probability of manipulating income.