J. of Multi. Fin. Manag. 23 (2013) 134–145 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Multinational Financial Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/econbase CEO’s financial experience and earnings management  Fuxiu Jiang ∗ , Bing Zhu, Jicheng Huang School of Business, Renmin University of China, 59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100872, China article info Available online 14 March 2013 JEL classification: G32 G34 M41 Keywords: Financial experience Earnings management Management turnover CEO abstract We study whether Chinese CEOs with financial experience engage in more earnings management or less earnings management than those without such experience. In doing so, we distinguish between accrual-based earnings management and real earnings manage- ment. Overall, we find that CEOs with financial experience tend to do less real earnings management, while we find no evidence that they do either more or less accrual-based earnings man- agement. Our findings tend to confirm that CEOs with financial experience provide more precise earnings information and higher quality financial statements. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Although top managers, especially CEOs, are presumed to have a generalist’s view, their past work experience shapes an orientation in their life, and this orientation can exert some influence on the firm’s strategic choices (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). The impact of the CEO’s work experience upon strategy adoption is well established. An early case study by Dearborn and Simon (1958) reports that when a group of executives from different functional areas are presented with the same problem,  We thank an anonymous referee and Kenneth A. Kim for the helpful and excellent comments. We acknowledge the financial support from Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (no. NCET-10-0796), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (nos. 11XNJ005, 11XNK029), and China National Natural Science Foundation (nos. 70972129 and 71172179). Any errors are entirely our own. Huang thanks the support of the Ministry of Education academic doctoral Prize in 2011. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: jfx@ruc.edu.cn (F. Jiang), lichendaozhu@163.com (B. Zhu), huangjicheng008@163.com (J. Huang). 1042-444X/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mulfin.2013.03.005