The objective of this paper is to review academic evidence on earnings management over the last twenty five years in order to help academic researchers, regulators and investors understand better the issues surrounding earnings management. The paper will be of special interest to investigators just starting to research this topic as we conduct an extensive literature review on earnings management from three different perspectives: a chronological perspective, in which we present the roadmap of the evolution of the earnings management literature in chronological order showing the main developments through the years; a methodological perspective, focusing on the different ways of detecting and measuring earnings management and respective improvements in the models; and a cross-country perspective, presenting the country of origin of the sample used by the authors. The last perspective might be of special interest to authors, as previous studies do not explore this perspective in detail
