الفهرس 
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Abstract
Earnings management is a serious problem which can affect the public confidence in financial statements. Scandals like Enron and World Com increased the importance of corporate governance throughout the world to safeguard the interest of shareholders and decrease earnings management practices. One of the main players in corporate governance is the audit committee which can play a central role to restrict managers to resort to earnings management practices. This study has two objectives. The first is to investigate the relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings management in Egypt. Second is to examine the state- owned firms as a moderator in the relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings management. The audit committee characteristics included in this study are audit committee independence, size and number of meetings. Discretionary accruals are used as a proxy for earnings management. The sample period is 2014 to 2016. 147 public listed firms across different sectors were included in the sample. The findings showed that there is a negative relationship between audit committee meetings and earnings management for the entire sample. In addition, there is an insignificant relationship between audit committee independence and audit committee size and earnings management. There is also an insignificant relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings management in state-owned firms. This study is limited by timeframe and geographically as it only examined Egypt. Further studies can investigate other countries, expand the timeframe and use other methods to measure earnings management.