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Research background: Deteriorating economic conditions and a negative outlook increase the pressure on financial management and the need to show high financial performance. According to Positive Accounting Theory, the growing risk of bankruptcy is associated with the phenomenon of earnings management. Bankruptcy risk and the quality of reported profits, along with other aspects of financial performance, vary throughout the company's life cycle. Nevertheless, these factors or their interactions are investigated only to a very small extent. Purpose of the article: The aim of this study is to clarify the impact of corporate life cycle and bankruptcy on earnings management, in order to describe behaviour of companies at different stages of corporate life cycle. Methods: A hierarchical mixed model with a random time and industry effect was chosen as appropriate because it allows the investigation of multilevel data that is not independent. The sample covers the financial indicators of more than 33,000 Central European companies from 2015?2019. The non-sequential Dickinson model, company age, and three models of accrual earnings management were used as proxies for the company's life cycle and quality of reported profit. Findings & value added: Earnings management and bankruptcy risk have a U-shape, indicating that financially distressed firms reduce reported accounting profit at the Introduction, Decline and, to a lesser extent, at the Growth stage. Slovak and Czech companies manipulate profits to a similar extent, Hungarian companies increase accounting profit to a greatest extent than the surveyed countries by controlling bankruptcy ? life cycle effect; however, the variability of accounting manipulations across industries has not been demonstrated. These findings imply that start-ups and declining businesses provide crooked financial statements to obtain more favourable debt covenants, and estimating discretionary accruals using life-cycle subsamples can improve the predictive power of accrual earnings management models.

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Foodwaste (hereinafter, FW) is the most voluminous solid waste and its amount is growing rapidly all over the world. The turning of FW into biogas via anaerobic fermentation is widely recognized as an environmentally responsible and economically reasonable option. Based on the knowledge obtained from agricultural biogas stations, the current methods of FW fermentation management are based on balancing the ratio of total carbon and nitrogen. However, it was repeatedly and independently reported that the stability of this process is low, resulting in many concessions in terms of prolonged hydraulic retention time or reduced biogas yield. Hence, biochemical as well as economic performance of the process is balanced by mixing of FW with agricultural residues. FW samples of various origin were collected and biochemically analyzed. The data indicate that FW originating from homes and luxury restaurants tends to be lignocellulose-based, whereas the levels of crude fiber (25% up to 27%) are higher than those from agricultural feedstock (18%). In contrast, FW from school canteens and inexpensive restaurants tends to be starch-based with high levels of amyloids (21% up to 23%) and fat (5% up to 7%). A novel method better reflecting the bioavailability of carbon and nitrogen to anaerobic consortia is proposed. It is demonstrated that the previous optimization methods could somehow reflect the availability of nutrients in agricultural feedstock, as carbonaceous and nitrogen sources are relatively equally biodegradable. Nevertheless, the biodegradability of FW is considerably different, which is why higher amounts of proteins and lipids lead to increased levels of ammonia and sulfide, resulting in an inhibitory effect on the metabolism of anaerobic consortia. Optimizing the anaerobic fermentation of FW by the new method outperforms the previous technique and makes it possible to process FW more intensively, or, more precisely, with higher profitability and lower proportion of ballast agricultural feedstock.