... earnings management than public companies in any other sample country.16 On the other end of the spectrum, public firms from the U.K and Finland exhibit low levels of earnings management For the ... combining all earnings management scores into a single index, the remainder of the analysis in the paper focuses on the aggregate earnings management index, EMaggr.18 Panel C of Table compares the ... sample of private and public firms from 13 European countries, we find that one dimension of earnings quality, earnings management, is more pervasive in private firms than in publicly traded firms, ...