Revista de Contabilidad - Spanish Accounting Review 2019, V. 22 N. 1

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Browsing Revista de Contabilidad - Spanish Accounting Review 2019, V. 22 N. 1 by Author "Licerán Gutiérrez, Ana"

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    A Review on the Multidimensional Analysis of Earnings Quality
    (2019) Licerán Gutiérrez, Ana; Cano Rodríguez, Manuel
    There is a generalized consensus among accounting researchers about the multidimensional nature of earn-ings quality: Earnings quality depends on a series of characteristics that enhance the usefulness of theearnings figure for decision making. In this paper, we undertake a literature revision on empirical researchon earnings quality that reveals that, although earnings quality is probably the most recurrent topic in ac-counting, empirical research that have treated earnings quality as a multidimensional concept is almostinexistent. In this sense, we document that: (1) Most of the empirical papers on earnings quality deal withjust one earnings characteristic, not including the potential effect of the other characteristics related to earn-ings quality. (2) Some characteristics (particularly, accruals quality and, in a lesser way, conservatism) arewidely employed for representing earnings quality, whereas other characteristics (smoothness, persistence)are much less used by researchers. (3) The research on the relationships among the different earningsquality characteristics is scant and with mixed results. (4) Only a few papers develop multidimensionalmeasures of earnings quality, but these measures are based on too restrictive assumptions and there is noevidence of superiority over single-dimension measures. We complement our bibliometric analysis by dis-cussing the limitations of both the single-dimension approach and the multidimensional approaches usedto date, illustrating our arguments with a simulation process. Henceforth, this review contributes to priorliterature highlighting the main problems in prior literature for earnings quality measurement.