1. Full Coverage and Research Database and the I/B/E/S database. Firms are required to be in manufacturing industries (SICs between 2000 and 3999), have December fiscal year-ends and total assets exceeding $1 million, and have data available for calculating discretionary accruals and independent variables. Additionally, there must be at least 20 firms per two-digit SIC industry, each firm must have at least 10 years of data;The sample is chosen from the intersection of firm-year observations contained in the 2000 Compustat Industrial