Chardonnens, Patrick Fiechter, Peter Wallmeier, Martin 2022-06-09 The zero-earnings discontinuity in the United States disappeared around the time when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) became effective, suggesting that SOX might have had a real and lasting impact on earnings management. In this research note, we examine a potential confounding effect of the dotcom boom at the turn of the millennium. Many firms that went public in this period had no sales revenues and therefore invariably incurred losses. When the stock market valuation was high, the losses scaled by the market value of equity often fell into the smallest loss interval, reducing the discontinuity in the overall sample. However, these observations do not indicate a decline in earnings management. We find that the dotcom effect is nonnegligible. When filtering out the firms without sales, our results no longer suggest a sharp decline in the zero-earnings discontinuity after SOX. Rather, our findings are consistent with a gradual decline in earnings management over time. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/320352 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/320352/files/2021_Chardonnens_Disappearance.pdf eng https://doi.org/10.1016/j.frl.2022.103033 https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3882896 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1016/j.frl.2022.103033 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined Finance Research Letters. - 2022, no. 49, p. 103033 Earnings management Zero-earnings discontinuity SOX Dotcom boom Earnings distribution Small loss avoidance info:eu-repo/classification/udc/33 The Disappearance of the Zero-Earnings Discontinuity: SOX, Dotcom Boom or Gradual Decline? http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501