In this article, we investigate the relationship between institutional, regulatory, regulatory and public-political aspects with earnings management in publicly traded companies in South American countries. We used a time series made up of publicly traded companies from 6 countries in South America, from 2003 to 2016. The four results smoothing measures discussed were influenced by institutional aspects. There are negative effects of the low quality of public institutions related to the government’s way of acting on quality measures based on cash. The adoption of IFRS was not significant for the dependent variables. It therefore innovates, inserts alternative institutional variables to those reviewed in the literature and determines new factor compositions. It presents contributions: i-theoretical when expanding the discussion on information quality and normative-regulatory and public-...