Section 2 discusses the definition of real activities manipulation and previous research. In Section 3, I identify firms that are likely to engage in real activities manipulation and develop hypotheses on how they should differ from the rest of the sample. I also develop hypotheses on cross-sectional variation in real activities manipulation. In Section 4, I discuss my data and estimation models, and present descriptive statistics. Section 5 presents my results. Section 6 discusses the implications of the evidence in this paper, as well as areas for further research.