الفهرس 
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Abstract
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between earnings management and cost stickiness. I argue that when managers have incentives to manage earnings upward, they tend to increase costs less for an increase in sales and to aggressively cut resources for an equivalent decrease in sales and thus cost stickiness decreases. Three proxies are used for management incentives to earnings management; namely management incentive to avoid reporting
a loss, incentive to avoid reporting an earnings decrease, and incentive to avoidreporting a loss and/ or an earnings decrease. A sample of 791 firm-year observations of non-financial firms listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange from 2013 to 2019 is used. To control for inflation, sales revenues and operating costs are deflated using Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deflator. The results support the hypotheses and show that when managers have incentives to manage earnings upward, cost stickiness decreases. These results shed light on the role of motivations underlying managerial decisions in affecting firm’s cost behavior.
Keywords: Cost stickiness, anti-sticky cost behavior, earnings management, earnings management incentives.