Public and private sector auditors and accruals quality in English NHS hospital Trusts

To promote auditor independence and audit quality in English NHS Trusts the Audit Commission regulates auditor rotation, fees and the appointment of its own and private sector auditors. NHS sanctioned departures from GAAP, some of which allow the financial breakeven target to be achieved, have been criticised by the Audit Commission as detrimental to financial discipline. In this paper, we investigate the association between abnormal accruals and the achievement of financial breakeven in NHS hospital Trusts over the period 1998–2005. We also investigate the association between abnormal accruals, audit fees and the Trusts audited by public and private sector auditors. We find evidence that abnormal accruals are used to achieve financial breakeven and they differ across different types of auditor. We also identify a negative relationship between abnormal accruals and NHS Trust star ratings. These findings raise questions about the ‘quality’ of NHS audit where compliance with NHS-specific regulations overrides the wider GAAP-based requirement for financial statements to show a true and fair view and they warrant reconsideration of the nature of audit in NHS Trusts.     

Opportunistic financial reporting around municipal bond issues

Understanding how government officials exercise discretion over financial reporting is essential for citizens, regulators, and researchers to interpret and monitor financial performance. I examine two measures of discretion in governmental financial statements: abnormal accruals in full accrual financial statements, and other financing sources and uses in modified accrual financial statements. Using a unique dataset of hand-collected financial data from California, I document empirically that municipal governments pursue a break-even income in both sets of financial statements, and that they focus particularly on avoiding deficits. Further, I find evidence that municipalities employ discretionary accruals but not other financing sources and uses to a greater extent before issuing bonds. Prior to bond issuance, officials facing deficits use less discretion. The results highlight the multidimensional and sometimes conflicting incentives government officials face, and the reporting strategies they use as they weigh the expected costs and benefits of using accounting gimmicks to report favorable bottom lines.     

The quality and conservatism of the accounting earnings of local governments

Our aim is to provide insight into the usefulness of accounting earnings for measuring the economic performance of local governments across Australia. Specifically, we explore whether (i) accrual accounting provides useful information, and (ii) earnings of local governments are conservative. We find that accrual accounting by local governments provides useful information as measured by the ability to predict one-year-ahead operating cash-flows. We find no conservatism in the financial reports of the average local government. This, we posit, is due to a lower level of demand for high-quality accrual-based financial reports from these entities. Consistent with this argument, both the quality of accruals and the degree of conservatism increase for local governments for which we predict a demand for higher-quality financial reporting.     

Do artificial income smoothing and real income smoothing contribute to firm value equivalently?

This paper examines the potential impacts of artificial smoothing (abnormal accruals) and real smoothing (derivatives) on firm value. We find that the value of the firm decreases with the magnitude of abnormal accruals and increases with the level of derivative use. Moreover, the accrual discount is more pronounced in firms with weak investor protection and the hedging premium is greater for poorly governed firms. These results suggest that although managers can engage in real smoothing to improve the informativeness of firms’ earnings and thus reduce agency costs, they might use artificial techniques to cosmetically improve the income stream in order to expropriate minority shareholders. In further support of agency theories, we report that poor corporate governance motivates the use of abnormal accruals and discourages derivative use.     

Earnings quality,bankruptcy risk and future cash flows

Prior research suggests that the quality of accruals may be compromised where the magnitude of accruals is abnormally high, due to the presence of errors in the accruals‐estimation process (Dechow and Dichev, 2002; Richardson, 2003). A consequence of this is that abnormal accruals may not map into realised future cash flows to the extent that would normally be expected of accruals data. Indeed, the association may be insignificant if abnormal accruals consist primarily of estimation noise. Our study investigates whether abnormal accruals for UK firms provide incremental insight into future cash flows. In particular, our paper may be viewed as a development of Subramanyam (1996). We find a significant positive association between abnormal accruals and one‐year‐ahead operating cash flows. This provides a rationale for the pricing of abnormal accruals by the market (Subramanyam, 1996; Xie, 2001) and suggests that abnormal accruals are not merely the products of noise in the accruals‐estimation process. However, our results are conditional upon the probability of one‐year‐ahead bankruptcy risk (Charitou et al., 2004). We also find that abnormal accruals possess small but significant explanatory power for future cash flows even when controlling for the disaggregation of accruals into individual items (Barth et al., 2001).     

Earnings management and abnormal returns: Evidence from the 1970–1972 Price Control Regulations

We examine the association between abnormal returns and earnings management in the context of price control regulations to test the construct validity of the earnings management model. Abnormal returns are used as a market–based measure, and discretionary accruals are employed to measure earnings management. Our results support the hypotheses that (1) price control regulations affect firms' security prices negatively, (2) firms make income–decreasing discretionary accruals to increase the likelihood of price increase approval, and (3) firms that are affected most negatively by the regulations manage earnings more aggressively. We conclude that the earnings management model we use in this study is capable of predicting opportunistic discretionary accruals.     

Accrual components and stock trading costs

This paper examines the relationship between accrual components and stock trading costs in China and finds that both abnormal and normal accruals are associated with these costs. Moreover, negative accruals, both abnormal and normal, have a greater influence on stock trading costs than positive accruals because of short-selling constraints in the Chinese stock market. Further analysis reveals that investors who are fixated on accruals are unable to separate positive or negative abnormal accruals from earnings in general. Additionally, investors overestimate the persistence of both positive and negative normal accruals. These findings constitute further evidence of the low degree of market efficiency in China. Chinese investors seem to overestimate firm value when abnormal and normal accruals are positive and underestimate it when they are negative, thus leading to an asymmetric effect on trading costs between positive and negative accruals in the face of short-selling constraints in the Chinese stock market.     

The Political Economy of Fiscal Supervision and Budget Deficits: Evidence from Germany

In many federal countries, local governments run large deficits, even when fiscal supervision by state authorities is tight. I investigate the extent to which party alignment of governments and fiscal supervisors influences budget deficits. The data set includes 427 German local governments for the period 2000–2004. I exploit a period after a far‐reaching institutional reform that entirely re‐distributed political powers on both the government level and the fiscal supervisor level. The results do not show that party alignments of governments and supervisors (co‐partisanship) drive short‐term deficits. Instead, I find that the ideology of partisan governments and supervisors matters: left‐wing local governments run higher deficits than their right‐wing counterparts; left‐wing supervisors tolerate higher deficits than right‐wing supervisors. These findings imply that political independence for fiscal supervisors is recommended.     

Asset write-offs discretion and accruals management in Taiwan: the role of corporate governance

Using a sample of Taiwan’s public firms, this paper examines whether managers use discretionary write-offs and abnormal accruals jointly to reach earnings targets and how corporate governance mechanisms react to such opportunistic behavior. We develop a set of simultaneous equations that capture executives’ incentives to manage earnings through write-offs and accrual management. These incentives include the existence and tightness of accounting-based covenants, “big bath,” income smoothing, and changes in senior management. The empirical results show that firms with larger discretionary write-offs also have lower discretionary accruals. In addition, we find that these earnings management tools are endogenous, suggesting that discretionary write-offs and discretionary accruals are partial complements for earnings manipulation and that their magnitudes are determined jointly. These findings contrast sharply with the tenor of discussion in the U.S. literature concerning the potential for using asset write-offs and discretionary accruals to manipulate earnings, which documents that managers use their discretion over accruals to signal economic realities rather than to obfuscate. Moreover, the results reveal that the empirical association between discretionary write-offs and abnormal accruals is more pronounced in weakly governed firms, suggesting that a strong governance setting is likely to constrain management’s discretionary behavior. The above implications are robust to a number of alternative specifications and variables definitions.     

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.     

Do abnormal accruals affect the life expectancy of audit engagements?

We examine the cross-sectional determinants of audit engagement length, paying particular attention to abnormal accruals as a potential driver. We are interested in how the potentially incongruent incentives of managers and auditors can cause frictions, and in turn affect the audit engagement’s life expectancy. We estimate a hazard model in the form of a multi-period logit model, allowing us to estimate (the inverse of) the life expectancy of audit engagements. We find that audit engagement life expectancy at any age decreases when firms make relatively large positive or large negative abnormal accruals. One interpretation of these results is that large positive (negative) abnormal accruals make the auditor (client) more likely to terminate the engagement. Conversely, smaller abnormal accruals reflect a compromise which extends the life of the engagement. Our results are robust to several alternative specifications and controls. However, because there is no complete theoretical model that explains audit engagement length, our results should be interpreted with caution.     

State ownership and abnormal accruals in highly-valued firms: Evidence from China

We examine how state ownership affects Chinese firms’ abnormal accruals during a period of high valuation. We find the magnitude of abnormal accruals first increases for up to three years of high valuation, and then reduces after the fourth year. We also find that managers turn to using abnormal real transactions after four consecutive years of high valuation. Next, we examine whether the degree of abnormal accruals in highly-valued firms differs between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-NSOEs. Supporting the view that SOE managers have less incentive to sustain high stock prices, we find evidence that highly-valued SOEs have significantly lower levels of abnormal accruals than highly-valued NSOEs during the period of high valuation. Our findings contribute to the literature on the cross-sectional variation in the relation between managers’ pressure to sustain high stock prices and their accounting choices in firms with different ownership structures.     

Are Entrenched Managers’ Accounting Choices More Predictive of Future Cash Flows?

We examine the role manager entrenchment has on firms’ financial reporting quality. More specifically, we test whether entrenched managers’ reported accruals deviate from industry norms and whether entrenched managers’ abnormal accruals are more (or less) predictive of future cash flows. Consistent with implications from prior research, we find that firms with entrenched managers generally report lower levels of abnormal accruals (in an absolute sense), but the abnormal accruals utilized by entrenched managers are more predictive of future cash flows. Contrary to a more traditional view of manager entrenchment, our evidence suggests that entrenched managers report higher quality abnormal accruals. While prior research provides evidence that manager entrenchment is associated with negative economic outcomes, we argue that attempts to limit entrenchment are unlikely to improve financial reporting quality and may actually lower quality. Future corporate governance research should consider not only the level but also the quality of the association between accounting choices and manager entrenchment.     

Earnings Quality Measures and Excess Returns

This paper examines how commonly used earnings quality measures fulfill a key objective of financial reporting, i.e., improving decision usefulness for investors. We propose a stock‐price‐based measure for assessing the quality of earnings quality measures. We predict that firms with higher earnings quality will be less mispriced than other firms. Mispricing is measured by the difference of the mean absolute excess returns of portfolios formed on high and low values of a measure. We examine persistence, predictability, two measures of smoothness, abnormal accruals, accruals quality, earnings response coefficient and value relevance. For a large sample of US non‐financial firms over the period 1988–2007, we show that all measures except for smoothness are negatively associated with absolute excess returns, suggesting that smoothness is generally a favorable attribute of earnings. Accruals measures generate the largest spread in absolute excess returns, followed by smoothness and market‐based measures. These results lend support to the widespread use of accruals measures as overall measures of earnings quality in the literature.     

Does Investor Sentiment Affect Earnings Management?

I hypothesize and find that earnings management via accruals is driven partially by the prevailing market‐wide investor sentiment. Managers inflate earnings in periods of higher sentiment, but report more conservatively during periods of low sentiment. Moreover, the likelihood of income‐increasing earnings management to avoid negative earnings surprises is also positively associated with investor sentiment. These results are robust to: (i) controls for time‐varying firm characteristics such as growth, investment opportunity sets, future profitability, leverage and size; (ii) macroeconomic variables such as future inflation, GDP growth, and growth in industrial production; (iii) multiple proxies for investor sentiment; and (iv) discretionary revenues as alternative measure of earnings management. Cross‐sectional analyses reveal that firms whose stock returns co‐move more with investor sentiment are more (less) likely to manage earnings upward via abnormal accruals in quarters of higher (lower) sentiment. The findings of managers’ strategic use of abnormal accruals show the need for increased attention from boards of directors, auditors and regulators to heightened managerial incentives to overstate earnings and to report optimistic earnings numbers during periods of high investor sentiment.     

Financial reporting quality in international settings: A comparative study of the USA, Japan, Thailand, France and Germany

The purpose of this study is to show the importance of the business contexts of individual countries to understand corporate accounting practices in international settings. Using data from five countries, we show that while agency theory constructs are effective in explaining accounting practices in corporate settings that have a strong agency orientation, such as that of the United States, it is necessary to go beyond such constructs to understand accounting practices in other corporate settings. Given the variety of international business settings, we use a generic theory, institutional theory. To conduct this examination into cross-country accounting practices, we focus on an earnings quality measure based on accrual accounting practices, the abnormal accruals component of accounting earnings. We provide evidence to support the view that with varying business settings we are likely to see diversity in accounting practices that result in different levels of accruals or accruals based earnings quality.     

The joint determination of audit fees, non-audit fees, and abnormal accruals

Prior research has estimated piece-meal the determinants of audit fees, non-audit fees and abnormal accruals. Intuition, informal analysis, and a variety of theories suggest that audit fees, non-audit fees, and abnormal accruals are jointly determined. We address this endogeneity issue by modeling the confluence of audit fees, fees for non-audit services and abnormal accruals in a system of simultaneous equations. Our joint estimation provides a starting point to look simultaneously at several competing theories. Using audit and non-audit fee data from the UK for 1994–2000, we find evidence consistent with knowledge spillovers (or economies of scope) from auditing to non-audit services and from non-audit services to auditing. While knowledge spillovers from non-audit services to auditing have been found in prior research [e.g. see Simunic, 1984], the presence of knowledge spillovers from auditing to non-audit services is a new result. Contrary to recent results in Ferguson et al. (2000) and Frankel et al. (2002), we do not find support for the assertion that fees for non-audit services increase abnormal accruals. In fact, contrary to the results in Ashbaugh et al. (2003) and Chung and Kallapur (2003), we find that non-audit fees decrease abnormal accruals, which we attribute to the productive effects of non-audit services. We also find evidence that audit fees increase abnormal accruals, consistent with behavioral theories of unconscious influence or bias in the auditor-client relation. The findings are robust to tests with US data. JEL Classification C30 · M40 · M41 · M49     

Litigation risk,accounting quality,and investment efficiency

This paper examines the moderating effect of litigation risk on the relationship between accounting quality and investment efficiency. We use directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance as a proxy for litigation risk, accruals quality for accounting quality, and investment cash flow sensitivity for investment efficiency (Biddle & Hilary, 2006; Hovakimian & Hovakimian, 2009). Using Canadian data from 1998 to 2008, we show that firms with higher D&O insurance coverage exhibit lower quality accruals. Moreover, the previously documented negative association between accruals quality and investment cash flow sensitivity is stronger (weaker) when abnormal D&O coverage is low (high), suggesting that the role of accounting quality in facilitating investment efficiency is conditional upon observable litigation risk.     

The Effect of Earnings–Announcement Timing on Earnings Management

This paper examines whether firms which delay earnings announcements engage in earnings management. The cross–sectional version of the modified Jones 1995 model is used to estimate 'normal' accruals. Prior research has documented that, on average, delayed earnings announcements are associated with negative earnings surprises. Our evidence suggests that the market anticipates unfavorable earnings news when it observes reporting delays. As a consequence, late reporters appear to make the most of a bad situation by employing income–decreasing accruals in big–bath–type earnings management and in contractual renegotiations. We find that the magnitude of income–reducing abnormal accruals is related to the reporting lag.