中文摘要：

盈余管理已经成为公司金融领域最活跃的研究热点问题之一，受到学者们的广泛关注。本文对20世纪80年代中后期以来关于盈余管理理论发展和实证研究的主要脉络进行全面回顾，并总结了国外最新的研究成果。本文的综述主要集中在三个方面：（1）基于“契约磨擦”与“沟通阻滞”分析了盈余管理产生的内在机理；（2）分别从资本市场动机、契约动机和政治成本动机总结了关于盈余管理的实证研究成果；（3）对应计利润分离模型、特定应计利润模型和频率分布模型三种盈余管理检验方法的具体应用进行了分析，并对其优点和不足之处进行了评价。

英文摘要：

Earnings management has become an important issue in corporate finance areas and received extensive attention of scholars. We roundly summarize the main academic results of earnings management including theoretical and empirical studies since the middle of 1980s,and sum up the foreign latest research results in this region. This paper mainly concentrate on three aspects： （ 1 ） Discussing the fundamental causes of earnings management based on contract theories and information asymmetry theories; （2） summarizing the study results about three motivations separately induced by capital market, contract and political cost; （3） assess the trade - offs of three measure means of earnings management such as separate accruals models, specific accruals models and the distribution of earnings after management.