The Determination of The Causality Tendency for The Relation between gency Costs and Earnings Management Practices: Does the Direction Change During Shocks? "An Empirical Study" Given that many financial market decisions rely on the usefulness of accounting information as an important criterion for the quality of many decisions, much of the accounting literature has studied and analyzed the relationship between profit management practices and agency costs as variables linked to the usefulness of such information. However, given the observed discrepancy in the direction of their relationship—agency costs and profit management practices—in this literature, the researchers believe that repeatedly studying the degree of correlation between them is insignificant. Rather, it is imperative to study "determining the direction of causality between them," which is what the current research seeks to achieve as a primary objective, especially under conditions of varying degrees of stability. This represents an important contribution to the current research as a secondary objective, in understanding the true nature of the relationship in Egyptian companies and the extent of its stability under different circumstances. This would be beneficial to the effectiveness of relevant decisions and the possibility of enhancing the generalizability of the results. Based on 1,355 total observations representing the Egyptian sectors, during the period 2009-2021, which were divided into four periods, the first of which represents the period of financial crisis (specifically: 2009-2010), the second period (2011-2013) as a representation of the period of political crisis, the third period represents a period of stability (specifically: 2014-2018); and the last period represents the period of the "Covid-19" pandemic (specifically: 2019, 2021); In light of the results of the statistical tests, and by adopting one of the established methods in this field—the cross-lagged panel correlation design—the study concluded that the direction of the relationship varied with the characteristics of the test periods. The direction of the relationship in the Egyptian market was in the form of "AC → EM," meaning that agency costs cause profit management for Egyptian companies, more strongly than the reverse. This is based on the correlation coefficients of the two time periods "t+n" and "t" during the three shock periods in the current study. The direction reverses to "EM → AC" during the stability period.