Data for: How CEO narcissism affects earnings management behaviors

On the basis of existing literature (Marquez-Illescas et al., 2018; Olsen et al., 2013), this study used a four-item index to construct the rating system for CEO narcissism ( ): (a) the prominence of the CEO’s photograph in annual reports, (b) the prominence of the CEO’s photograph in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, (c) the CEO’s cash compensation, and (d) the noncash compensation of the CEO relative to other top executives at the same company.

Our rating system incorporated CEOs that appear in photographs in annual and CSR reports. CSR reports follow widely adopted global guidelines set by the Global Reporting Initiative for the transparent disclosure of corporate values and performances, whereby the CSR report constitutes voluntary information disclosure (Krishnamurti et al., 2018).