Digital Analysis Of Sales And Industry Partition: An Examination Of U.S. Public Companies

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that companies' managers tend to round-up reported earnings (Carslaw, 1988; Thomas, 1989; Niskanen & Keloharju, 2000) and sales revenue (Jordan et al., 2009). The frequency of zero as second digit in earnings and sales is much higher than expected frequency. The current study confirms this finding for sales in a sample of U.S. public companies but further shows that this rounding behavior is focused on only few industries. Another finding is that for the financial industry, round-up behaviour is significantly more important for large firms.