Quarterly Earnings Management Through R&D and Accruals Manipulation

Quarterly Earnings Management Through R&D and Accruals Manipulation PDF Author: Meng Yan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Quarterly Earnings Management Through R&D and Accruals Manipulation

Quarterly Earnings Management Through R&D and Accruals Manipulation PDF Author: Meng Yan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


Evidence on the Tradeoff Between Real Manipulation and Accrual Manipulation: to 25; Pages:26 to 50; Pages:51 to 75; Pages:76 to 100; Pages:101 to 120

Evidence on the Tradeoff Between Real Manipulation and Accrual Manipulation: to 25; Pages:26 to 50; Pages:51 to 75; Pages:76 to 100; Pages:101 to 120 PDF Author: Amy Yunzhi Zang
Publisher: ProQuest
ISBN: 9780549163251
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Quarterly Earnings Management

Quarterly Earnings Management PDF Author: Demetris Christodoulou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This paper examines the systematic difference between interim and fourth quarters in managerial decisions to engage in accruals and real activities management to meet analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts. Findings reveal that managers engage in income-increasing accounting accruals manipulations during the interim quarters. Managers engage in real activities management during the final quarter, through reductions in R&D and SG&A expenditures, aggressive sales discounts and overproduction of inventory. The managerial intervention with normal levels of R&D has become increasingly common following the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in 2003, and occurs throughout all four quarters. In the post-SOX period, firms also engage in aggressive sales discounts and overproduction before the year-end in order to boost earnings. There is an evident managerial preference in the timing between accruals and real activities management with the former being prevalent during the interim quarters when the discretion to delay expense recognition is allowed as part of integral accounting and the auditors scrutiny is absent, and the later only taking place mostly in the final quarter given the cost of adjusting operations towards meeting short term myopic targets. The business practice of reducing R&D and SG&A spending to gain short-term financial benefits is an unintended outcome that is partially attributed to the US accounting requirements of the direct expensing of firms' internal intangible investments. The myopic investment behaviour poses a barrier to the generation and development of firms' intellectual capital and may have detrimental effects on the long-term economic advances.

Accounting-based Earnings Management and Real Activities Manipulation

Accounting-based Earnings Management and Real Activities Manipulation PDF Author: Wei Yu
Publisher: ProQuest
ISBN: 9780549801795
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Earnings Management

Earnings Management PDF Author: Joshua Ronen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387257713
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 587

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Book Description
This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

Measuring the Pervasiveness of Earnings Management from Quarterly Accrual Volatility

Measuring the Pervasiveness of Earnings Management from Quarterly Accrual Volatility PDF Author: Zhaoyang Gu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Earnings management is a key issue for financial reporting. The purpose of this paper is to derive a set of indices to measure the pervasiveness of earnings management (PEM) using the properties of quarterly accrual volatility. The PEM index can be viewed as a quality measure of financial reporting and an effectiveness measure for financial monitoring. In contrast to mean-shifting studies in the literature, our measure based on accrual volatility yields two major advantages. First, it relieves us of the necessity of precise assumptions regarding economic events. Second, it provides a macro-perspective on the overall patterns in earnings management. The methodology based on accrual volatility can address issues like the earnings quality, the nature of the informational environment, and the effect of accounting standard setting. The seasonal pattern of accrual volatility can provide a trace of earnings management, even in the absence of further information about specific economic events and resulting managerial actions. Our working hypothesis is that pervasive earnings management leads to the first order stochastic dominance of fourth quarter accrual volatility over the other three quarters. We provide evidence on the relations between previously documented drivers of earnings management and seasonal accrual heteroskedasticity. These drivers include executive compensation, regulatory requirements, bond covenants, and political costs. This empirical support of our working hypothesis validates our application of Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) Distance to measure the pervasiveness of earnings management (PEM). We use raw total accruals as the basis for measuring PEM1 and use residuals from Jones? [1991] model to control for mechanical factors in our measurement of PEM2. The usefulness of controls is an empirical issue. Our results suggest that additional controls do not add much power to detect earnings management over and above the simplest measure based on total accruals. KS Distance is powerful in detecting the difference around the central locations of two distributions, but not powerful at the tail ends. We develop two other measures for PEM. First, we estimate the fraction of fourth quarter accruals volatility exceeding the 95th percentile value for the first three quarters (base period) distribution. This fraction, reduced by 5%, constitutes PEM3. Second, we design a simulation method to determine PEM4 as the percentage of firms with a given magnitude of accrual adjustment for the base period accrual volatility to match that of the fourth quarter. Both PEM3 and PEM4 are estimates of percentage of firms involved in earnings management of a given magnitude. However, we should note here that our PEM indices are more likely ordinal than cardinal measures. Though our methods of measuring PEM rely on indirect measurement, we provide direct evidence on the relevance of our method through a series of external validation checks. First, we use a subsample of firms subject to SEC actions relating to alleged earnings manipulation. This data was collected from Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAER's) by the SEC. We compare PEM?s for the AAER sample to PEM?s for the COMPUSTAT sample to assess the power of our measures. The PEM indices for the AAER sample are two to three times as large as the PEM indices for the COMPUSTAT sample. Though we avoid interpreting the relative magnitudes literally, these differences do suggest a positive correlation between our PEM indices and the degree of earnings management. Second, we conduct case studies for 10 firms identified by fourth quarter accrual volatility as strongly suspect of earnings management. These studies show that suspect firms frequently engage in activities associated with earnings management, such as CEO turnover, restructuring, public offerings, or they experience losses. Applying our PEM indices to COMPUSTAT data, we find that pervasiveness of earnings management has been relatively stable in the period of 1988-1996.

Earnings Management in the Context of Fair Value Accounting

Earnings Management in the Context of Fair Value Accounting PDF Author: Changling Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Since the late 1980s, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has implemented several new fair value accounting rules that have resulted in unrealized fair value gains or losses in net income. However, accrual-based earnings management models such as the Modified Jones Model (MJM) of Dechow, Sloan, and Sweeney (1995) and other accrual models in the literature do not consider the net income effects of fair value accounting. The fair value hierarchy of Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 157 implies that valuation of level 1 and level 2 instruments is subject to observable market inputs, whereas the valuation inputs of level 3 are unobservable. Therefore, with respect to earnings management, level 3 instruments are more likely to be manipulated relative to level 1 and level 2 instruments. In this paper, we adjust the MJM by adding level 1 and level 2 instruments as explanatory variables to nondiscretionary accruals; we classify net income effects of level 3 instruments as discretionary accruals in our Fair Value Adjusted Modified Jones Model (FVAMJM). We show that the FVAMJM is more powerful than the MJM in detecting earnings manipulation based on level 3 instruments and is equally good in detecting expense and revenue manipulations. In addition, the nondiscretionary accruals derived under FVAMJM have incremental explanatory power to firm market value beyond the accruals of the traditional MJM; the discretionary accruals derived under FVAMJM contribute to identifying companies meeting or beating earnings targets after controlling for MJM discretionary accruals.

Accruals and Real Earnings Management

Accruals and Real Earnings Management PDF Author: Umar Butt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This paper examines earnings management activities around debt covenant violations. We focus on accruals management and real activities manipulation behavior of managers in the quarters around the covenant violation. We expect covenant restrictions to influence these activities in the quarters surrounding and the quarter of the violation. The evidence is consistent with managers manipulating earnings using accrual-based and real earnings management activities and provides evidence for the debt covenant hypothesis. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that managers appear to manipulate accruals in successive quarters in order to increase reported earnings. The evidence on the use of real activities suggests that while managers increase reported earnings in the violation quarter, they have limited discretion over the use of real earnings management techniques in the quarters surrounding the violation.

Research and Development and Earnings Management. An Empirical Analysis of Analysts’ Reactions during Conference Calls

Research and Development and Earnings Management. An Empirical Analysis of Analysts’ Reactions during Conference Calls PDF Author: Julian Kasturiarachchige
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668486557
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, LMU Munich (Instituts für Rechnungswesen und Wirtschaftsprüfung), language: English, abstract: This study is an attempt to combine two important streams of accounting research: The problem of earnings management (hereafter EM) and the role of conference calls (hereafter CCs) as disclosure medium. In doing so, I focus on real activities manipulation (hereafter RM) through cutting R&D expenses. I contribute to the existing literature by answering two questions: Firstly, whether the risk of managers engaging in RM via R&D spending affects the probability of analysts, or management addressing those cuts during CCs. Secondly, if the analyst community benefits from such discussions, by obtaining useful information, not accessible via other information channels. To answer these questions, I examine the 4th quarter earnings conference call transcripts of 300 firm years with an increased RM risk. I use content analysis to measure analysts’ and managers’ reactions, and create dummy variables that contain the information found.

The Accrual Effect on Future Earnings

The Accrual Effect on Future Earnings PDF Author: Narasimhan Jegadeesh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This paper fills this gap by examining how current accruals affect future earnings (the accrual effect) and measuring the size of this effect. We find that the aggregate future earnings will decrease by $0.046 and $0.096, respectively, in the next one and three years for a $1 increase of current accruals. Over the very long-term (25 years), 20% of current accruals will reverse. This negative accrual effect is more significant for firms with high price-earnings ratios, high market-to-book ratios and high accruals where earnings management is more likely to occur. We show that incorporating the accrual effect is useful in improving the accuracy of earnings forecasts for these firms. Accordingly, the empirical results are consistent with the notion that earnings management causes the negative relationship between current accruals and future earnings. In addition, this paper shows that one recently developed accrual model has better performance than the popularly cited model in identifying manipulated earnings.