158178388
Earnings quality of Indonesian firms surrounding initial public offerings
This research aims to examine the changes in earnings quality of Indonesian firms transitioning from private to public companies by examining accounting-based attributes of earnings; accrual quality, earnings persistence, and earnings predictability, before and after IPO. Accrual quality is assessed using the abnormal accrual model and Dechow and Dichev (DD) model; earnings persistence and predictability are assessed through net income autoregressive model. Using 103 Indonesian non-finance IPO firms, this research concludes that earnings quality of IPO firms changed along with the alteration of their status from private to public firms. Post-IPO (after becoming public firms), the sample shows a higher quality of earnings in terms of accrual quality and earnings persistence increases after IPO. However, this research could not reject the hypothesis of decreasing post-IPO earnings predictability due to the nature of IPO firms.
55023450
Are Accruals during Initial Public Offerings Opportunistic?
We find evidence that initial public offering (IPO) firms, on average, have high positive issue-year earnings and abnormal accruals, followed by poor long-run earnings and negative abnormal accruals. The IPO-year abnormal, and not expected, accruals explain the cross-sectional variation in post-issue earnings and stock returns. The results are robust with respect to alternative abnormal accruals and earnings performance measures. IPO firms adopt more income-increasing depreciation policies when they deviate from similar prior performance same industry non-issuers, and they provide significantly less for uncollectible accounts receivable than their matched non-issuers. The results taken together suggest opportunistic earnings management partially explains the new issues anomaly.
154837082
The Importance of Reporting Incentives: Earnings Management in European Private and Public Firms
A mounting arrangement for a plurality of electrical components is disclosed wherein these components may be included in cases which are stacked in sets on a level-by-level basis. These cases include resilient mounting tabs on each end thereof which cooperate with mounting plates and allow a plurality of cases to be stacked in each layer and subsequent additional layers stacked on top of the first layers.
154937370
EARNINGS QUALITY IN UK PRIVATE FIRMS: COMPARATIVE LOSS RECOGNITION TIMELINESS
Abstract UK private and public companies face substantially equivalent regulation on auditing, accounting standards and taxes. We hypothesize that private company financial reporting nevertheless is of lower quality due to different market demand, regulation notwithstanding. A large UK sample supports this hypothesis. Quality is operationalized using Basu's (1997) time-series measure of timely loss recognition and a new accruals-based method. The result is not affected by controls for size, leverage, industry membership and auditor size, or by allowing endogenous listing choice. The result enhances understanding of private companies, which are predominant in the economy. It also provides insight into the economics of accounting standards.
1638105
Does Public Ownership of Equity Improve Earnings Quality?
ABSTRACT: We compare the quality of accounting numbers produced by two types of public firms—those with publicly traded equity and those with privately held equity that are nonetheless considered p...
166376497
Earnings Management in Public and Private Companies : Evidence from Finland
The paper studies earnings management in public and private companies and whether earnings management is a function of leverage. A matched sample with 99 public and 99 private Finnish companies is ...
55044217
Earnings Quality at Initial Public Offerings
Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public investors, who face higher information asymmetry than private investors. The market mechanisms for enforcing this demand include monitoring by internal and external auditors, boards, analysts, rating agencies, the press and other parties. Once public, firms are subject to greater regulatory scrutiny and penalties. From the point of releasing the public prospectus document onwards, IPO firms face a greater threat of shareholder litigation and regulatory action if they do not meet higher reporting standards. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of this hypothesis. We show that the evidence reported by Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998) in support of the alternative hypothesis, that IPO firms opportunistically inflate earnings to influence the IPO price, is unreliable for a variety of reasons. We provide cleaner evidence, from samples of U.K. and U.S. IPOs, that IPO prospectus financials are conservative by several standards. We conjecture that the types of bias we observe in conventional estimates of "discretionary" accruals occur in a broad genre of studies on earnings management around large transactions and events.
13580171
Corporate Ownership Structure and the Informativeness of Accounting Earnings in East Asia
This paper hypothesizes that the threat of expropriation by controlling owners in East Asian corporations lowers the credibility of accounting earnings and hence the stock price informativeness of those earnings. The complicated share ownership structure of East Asian corporations, characterized by a voting control that is highly concentrated in the hands of families, and a large separation of their voting rights from cash flow rights, provides controlling owners with both the ability and incentive to expropriate minority shareholders. We document that the informativeness of earnings, measured by the earnings-return relation, decreases with the level of an ultimate owner's voting control and the extent to which the owner's voting rights exceed her cash flow rights. We also find that family control per se does not lower the informativeness of earnings. Earnings become less informative when controlling families maintain high voting power and large separation of voting from cash flow rights. Our results are generally robust to controls for firm size, market-to-book assets, leverage, number of industry segments operated by the firm, and to varying the starting and ending dates of the stock return window.
154678681
Type of earnings management and the effect of ownership structure, firm size, and corporate-governance practices: Evidence from Indonesia
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether companies listed on the Jakarta Stock Exchange (JSE) conduct efficient or opportunistic earnings management and to examine the effect of ownership structure, firm size, and corporate-governance practices on it. Using multiple regressions, we find evidence that the type of earnings management selected by JSE listed firms tends toward efficient earnings management. This evidence is inconsistent with the common view that earnings management in Indonesia is opportunistic. Family ownership has a significant influence on the type of earnings management selected. Firms with a high proportion of family ownership and non-business groups are more inclined to choose efficient earnings management than other types of firms. We find inconsistent evidence with regard to the impact of institutional ownership, firm size, and corporate-governance practices on type of earnings management.
154504525
Do Indonesian Firms Inflate Their Reported Earnings Prior to IPOs
This study attempts to provide evidence on earnings management of Indonesian firms one year prior to going public. The focus of this study is abnormal portion of accruals. These accruals are estimated using methodologies proposed by Dechow et al. (1995), and Kothari et al. (2005). This study finds no evidence that, on average, Indonesian firms manipulate their reported earnings to obtain higher proceeds from their IPOs. The findings stand even after size and leverage levels are considered in evaluating the incidences of earnings managements prior to IPOs. These findings support the arguments of Watts (2003) that empirical evidences show that public firms utilize conservative accounting and the practice becomes more conservative lately. It is also in line with Ball and Shivakumar’s argument (2005 and 2006) that the demand, for higher quality financial reports from public investors, forces IPO firms to improve their reporting quality prior to IPO and that regulation of publicly‐listed companies imposes greater requirements than non‐listed companies.
154124303
Earnings Quality and Firm Valuation: International Evidence
This study uses a sample of over 7000 firms in 38 countries to investigate the relation between firm valuation and earnings quality. We find a positive and significant relation between firm valuation and an aggregate earnings quality measure based on seven earnings attributes (accruals quality, persistence, predictability, smoothness, value relevance, timeliness, and conservatism). This relation is particularly strong for firms with greater investment opportunities and more need for external finance, and for firms in low investor protection countries. Thus, firms are able to compensate for a weak legal environment by adopting higher earnings quality standards, particularly when they need to gain access to global capital markets. Overall, our findings suggest that firms with higher earnings quality are valued more highly in stock markets, supporting the idea that investors require a premium for the information risk associated with lower-quality earnings.
154335227
Earnings Management to Avoid Earnings Decreases and Losses
Anecdotal evidence and recent research suggest there are incentives to avoid earnings decreases and losses. This paper provides systematic evidence that firms increase reported earnings to achieve these goals. Specifically, using all available observations on the annual industrial and research Compustat database for the years 1976-1994, cross-sectional distributions of scaled annual earnings changes and earnings are bell-shaped and fairly smooth except in the regions near zero. For both earnings changes and levels distributions, there is a trough immediately to the left of zero and a peak immediately to the right of zero which are inconsistent with the overall shape of the remainder of the distribution, i.e., the frequencies of small decreases in earnings and small losses are unusually low and the frequencies of small increases in earnings and small positive income are unusually high. Exploring the methods of earnings management, we find evidence that two components of earnings, cash flow from operations and changes in working capital, are used to achieve the manipulation of earnings. Finally, we present two theories about the motivation for avoidance of earnings decreases and losses. We find that the main results of this paper are consistent with both prospect theory and managerial opportunistic behavior motivated by stakeholder use of earnings-related heuristics.
113400953
Earnings Management to Exceed Thresholds
Investors are keenly interested in financial reports of earnings because earnings provide important information for investment decisions. Thus, executives who are monitored by investors and directors face strong incentives to manage earnings. We introduce consideration of behavioural/institutional thresholds for earnings in this mix of incentives and governance. A model illustrates how thresholds induce specific types of earnings management. Empirical explorations find clear support for earnings management to exceed each of the three thresholds that we consider: positive profits, sustain-recent-performance, and meet-market-expectations. The thresholds are hierarchically ranked. The future performance of firms that possibly boost earnings to just cross a threshold appears to be poorer than that of less suspect control groups.
14737674
CEO Incentives and Earnings Management
We provide evidence that the use of discretionary accruals to manipulate reported earnings is more pronounced at firms where the CEO's potential total compensation is more closely tied to the value of stock and option holdings. In addition, during years of high accruals, CEOs exercise unusually large amounts of options and CEOs and other insiders sell large quantities of shares.
14988673
The World Price of Earnings Opacity
We analyze the financial statements of 58,653 firm-years from 34 countries for the period 1985-1998 to construct a panel data set measuring three dimensions of earnings opacity for each country - earnings aggressiveness, loss avoidance, and earnings smoothing. We combine these three dimensions to obtain an overall earnings opacity time-series measure per country. We then explore whether earnings opacity affects two dimensions of an equity market in a country - the return the shareholders demand and how much they trade. While not all results are consistent for our three individual earnings opacity dimensions, our panel data tests document that, after controlling for other influences, an increase in overall earnings opacity in a country is linked to an increase in the cost of equity and a decrease in trading in the stock market of that country.
37847542
Earnings-based bonus plans and earnings management by business-unit managers 1 We thank the Center f
This study tests the Fixed-Target Hypothesis (Healy, 1985), wherein it is hypothesized that managers make discretionary accrual decisions to maximize their short-term bonuses. We conduct our analysis using business unit-level rather than firm-level data. In our setting, business unit manager incentive compensation is based solely on business unit earnings. Therefore, the potentially confounding effects of long-term performance and stock-based incentive compensation present in previous research are absent. Using multiple measures of discretionary accruals, we find evidence consistent with Healy (1985) in that managers with bonus- related incentives to make income-increasing discretionary accruals do so relative to managers with incentives to use accrual discretion to decrease earnings. To the extent that external financial reporting represents an aggregation of business unit financial reports, our results highlight the importance of internal contracting as a determinant of external reporting, as conjectured by Watts and Zimmerman (1990).
154385620
Earnings Management Around Debt-Covenant Violations – An Empirical Investigation Using a Large Sample of Quarterly Data
I find that managers manage earnings upward in the quarters preceding a debt-covenant violation, but downward in the quarter a violation occurs. And they continue to manage earnings downward while the firm remains in violation. Because this scenario can play out within a year, the use of yearly data to examine the debt-covenant hypothesis can be problematic. Further analysis shows that the earnings management around the debt-covenant violation is also done to improve the manager’s bargaining power in the renegotiation that follows the violation. Furthermore, I find no evidence of excessive earnings management by high-debt firms to stave off a violation, but I do find evidence that the Sarbanes–Oxley Act restrains managers from using accruals to stave off a violation. These results are based on examining 193,803 firm-quarters, 8,804 firms, and 2,035 new covenant violations spanning 1996 to 2007.
153561381
Litigation Risk, Audit Quality, and Audit Fees: Evidence from Initial Public Offerings
ABSTRACT: We use the IPO setting to examine the relation between auditor exposure to legal liability and audit quality and audit fees. With regard to audit quality, we report robust evidence that pre-IPO audited accruals are negative and less than post-IPO audited accruals. In contrast to extant literature, our findings provide scant support for the inference that auditors acquiesce to opportunistic earnings management by issuers in an attempt to increase the offering price. With regard to audit fees, we find auditors earn higher fees for IPO engagements than post-IPO engagements. While inherent differences in auditor responsibilities between IPO audits and post-IPO audits should lead to higher fees for IPOs, a substantial portion of IPO audit fees (in levels and changes) is associated with our proxy for the auditor’s 1933 Act exposure. Overall, our results suggest that both audit quality and audit fees are higher in a higher-litigation regime, consistent with the effects an increase in litigation exposur...
199139827
Board Characteristics, Audit Committee Characteristics and Abnormal Accruals
This paper examines the relation between governance (as measured by board and audit committee characteristics) and accounting quality (as measured by abnormal accruals) in a setting where there is no a priori reason to suspect systematic management of earnings. Using data from Singapore and Malaysia, we find both board size and audit committee independence are related to lower abnormal working capital accruals. Furthermore, the relation between audit committee independence and higher quality accounting exists only when the abnormal accruals are income increasing. This suggests that audit committees are effective in the financial reporting process by reducing the level of income increasing abnormal accruals. The results also indicate that audit committees are effective only when all members are independent directors.
166688877
The Effect of Board Characteristics and Audit Committee Existence on Earnings Quality of Indonesian State-Owned Enterprises
The objective of this research is to determine the effect of Board of Commissioners characteristics which is assessed by number or size of, level of independence of, and amount of remuneration received by the Board of Commissioners on earning’s quality of Indonesia’s State-Owned Enterprises (“SOE”). The objective of this research is also to determine whether the existence of Audit Comittee has significant effect on the earnings quality of the SOE. Hypotheses testing are done by using a multiple regression model with 111 sample of State-Owned Enterprises whose majority share is owned by the state during 2009 dan 2010. The results provide empirical evidence that independency of Board of Commissioners increases the SOE earnings quality, meanwhile the other Board characteristics and the existence of Audit Committee has no significant effect on the SOE earnings quality.
154725345
The Quality of Accruals and Earnings: The Role of Accrual Estimation Errors
This paper suggests a new measure of one aspect of the quality of working capital accruals and earnings. One role of accruals is to shift or adjust the recognition of cash flows over time so that t...
34653480
Earnings Quality Metrics and What They Measure
This paper provides a theory of earnings quality metrics, explaining what they capture and how they are related with each other. We develop a simple economy in which a manager has market price, earnings, and smoothing incentives and can bias earnings reports. This economy provides a framework for the analysis of earnings quality metrics. We express value relevance, persistence, predictability, smoothness, and discretionary accruals in terms of their primitives, the manager’s incentives, operating risk, and accounting noise, and examine their behavior on varying these primitives. We find that some of them, particularly value relevance and persistence, trace closely the change in information content in our setting. In contrast, smoothing and discretionary accruals reflect the rational market reaction to the earnings reports inconsistently. These results provide guidance for understanding and selecting metrics in empirical tests.
155428504
Intended use of IPO proceeds and firm performance: A quantile regression approach☆
This paper investigates the link between intended use of proceeds and the decline in post-issue operating performance of IPO firms. It distinguishes between capital and strategic motives and employs quantile regressions to examine the Indonesian equity market over the period of 2000–2010. The overall evidence shows that post-issue performance can be explained by firm motivation to IPO issue with the capital motive being the critical driver of good performance in Indonesia. Investment in fixed assets and in stock market shares lead to better performance while other usages lead to poor performance. The results are robust to accounting for ownership structure and to alternative classifications of IPO intent. These results have policy implications for the management of IPO proceeds.
39850238
Earnings Volatility and Earnings Predictability
Survey evidence indicates widely held managerial beliefs that earnings volatility is negatively related to earnings predictability. In addition, existing research suggests that earnings volatility is determined by economic and accounting factors, and both of these factors reduce earnings predictability. We find that the consideration of earnings volatility brings substantial improvements in the prediction of both short- and long-term earnings. Conditioning on volatility information also allows one to identify systematic errors in analyst forecasts, which implies that analysts do not fully understand the implications of earnings volatility for earnings predictability.
153814878
The Life Cycle of Initial Public Offering Firms
This study uses an integrated and comprehensive approach to study the evolution of IPO issuing firms to the three basic post-IPO states: survive as an independent firm, get acquired, or fail. We develop multinomial logit models that utilize information available at or prior to the IPO to predict the probability of subsequent transition to the three post-IPO states. We find that lower risk, larger firm size, higher investment banker prestige, higher pre-IPO operating performance, and higher industry R&D intensity increase the probability of survival relative to failure. We also find that higher firm size, higher industry R&D intensity, and industry concentration increase the probability of survival relative to being acquired. Finally, lower risk and higher investment banker prestige increase the probability of being acquired relative to failure. Overall, we identify several factors that influence the probability of subsequent transition to one of the three basic post-IPO states. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.