Impact of product market competition on real activity manipulation: Moderating role of managerial ability

In this study, we examine whether managerial ability moderates the association between product market competition and real earnings management. Prior literature largely supports the disciplinary effect of competition, suggesting that competition reduces real activity manipulation. We argue that this association is different depending on the level of managerial ability. Based on the reputation hypothesis, we argue that able managers negatively moderate the association between competition and real activity manipulation. Using a sample of US listed companies from 1997 to 2016, we find evidence to support our moderating assertion. A battery of robustness tests validates our original findings.     

Product market competition and earnings management: Evidence from discretionary accruals and real activity manipulation

We examine the association between product market competition and earnings management activities. We use the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a widely used measure for market concentration, as a proxy for product market competition. We examine two forms of earnings management: accrual-based and real activity-based. Our results are mixed, but generally suggest that both income-increasing accrual manipulation and real activity-based manipulation are more prevalent among firms in low competition industries than those in high competition industries. Our findings are robust to various measures of earnings management, alternative measures of product market competitions, and different subsamples. We further explore the reasons why firms in low competition industries are more inclined to manage earnings and find that the market consequences of missing important earnings targets are more severe among firms in low competition industries than those in high competition industries.     

Overvaluation and earnings management: Does the degree of overvaluation matter?

We examine whether the choice of earnings management strategies employed by managers of overvalued firms depends on the degree of market overvaluation. By distinguishing between substantially overvalued (SOV) and relatively overvalued (ROV) firms, we find that SOV firms significantly inflate earnings using both accruals-based and real earnings management. In contrast, managers of ROV firms do not engage in accruals-based earnings management and their firms’ accounts tend to report higher discretionary expenses. The reported higher discretionary expenses of ROV firms are comparable to the discretionary expenses of firms in the expanding stage of their business life cycle, a pattern consistent with ROV firms increasing discretionary expenses to finance growth and hence justify the high market valuation. Overall, we show that the existing evidence on income-increasing earnings management by overvalued firms is mainly driven by the pressure to sustain the high market valuation of firms that are substantially overvalued.     

The effect of financial leverage on real and accrual-based earnings management

Past research has documented a substitution effect between real earnings management (RM) and accrual-based earnings management (AM), depending on relative costs. This study contributes to this research by examining whether levels of (and changes in) financial leverage have an impact on this empirically documented trade-off. We hypothesise that in the presence of high leverage, firms that engage in earnings manipulation tactics will exhibit a preference for RM due to a lower possibility – and subsequent costs – of getting caught. We show that leverage levels and increases positively and significantly affect upward RM, with no significant effect on income-increasing AM, while our findings point towards a complementarity effect between unexpected levels of RM and AM for firms with very high leverage levels and changes. This is interpreted as an indication that high leverage could attract heavy outsider scrutiny, making it necessary for firms to use both forms of earnings management in order to achieve earnings targets. Furthermore, we document that equity investors exhibit a significantly stronger penalising reaction to AM vs. RM, indicating that leverage-induced RM is not as easily detectable by market participants as debt-induced AM, despite the fact that the former could imply deviation from optimal business practices.     

The consequences of earnings management for the acquisition premium in friendly takeovers

This study investigates the effect of earnings management (EM) on deal premiums in friendly takeovers. It examines both accruals and real EM in the year preceding the deal announcement, based on a sample of 578 European firms subject to an acquisition or acquisition attempt between 2005 and 2015. The empirical findings suggest that downward EM is associated with a higher premium offered by the acquirer. The results suggest that income-decreasing accounting choices could be a negotiated strategy between the acquirer and target firms’ managers to clean the balance sheet, reduce the likelihood of litigation, and create a fictive performance through an accrual reversal post-acquisition.     

Cross‐Firm Real Earnings Management

Our analysis is rooted in the notion that stockholders can learn about the fundamental value of any firm from observing the earnings reports of its rivals. We argue that such intraindustry information transfers, which have been broadly documented in the empirical literature, may motivate managers to alter stockholders’ beliefs about the value of their firm not only by manipulating their own earnings report but also by influencing the earnings reports of rival firms. Managers obviously do not have access to the accounting system of peer firms, but they can nevertheless influence the earnings reports of rival firms by distorting real transactions that relate to the product market competition. We demonstrate such managerial behavior, which we refer to as cross‐firm real earnings management, and explore its potential consequences and interrelation with the practice of accounting‐based earnings management within an industry setting with imperfect (nonproprietary) accounting information.     

Mandatory IFRS adoption: the trade-off between accrual-based and real earnings management

This paper examines whether firms substituted real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management after the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) became mandatory. Using a sample of 101,331 firm-year observations from 33 countries between 2000 and 2010, we show that IFRS adoption came with the unintended consequence of certain firms substituting real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management, especially among firms in countries with strict enforcement regimes. Furthermore, we document that the trade-off is confined to EU countries in which strong firm-level characteristics (i.e. the firm-level mechanism of control, the market’s level of scrutiny, and firm-specific incentives to provide transparency) are coupled with strong enforcement. We also show that IFRS had an effect in countries outside the EU, albeit at a different time. Overall, the results suggest that accounting regulators’ efforts to increase earnings quality might have had the unintended consequence of increasing real earnings management activities.     

Real earnings manipulation and future performance: A revisit using quarterly data of firms with debt covenants

We investigate the implications of real earnings manipulation (REM) and reversals of REM on firms’ future operating performance using quarterly data of firms with debt covenants. In the presence of debt covenants, firms are under persistent pressure to deliver financial results that exceed the thresholds of the debt covenant requirements. We find that REM is associated with lower future operating performance. More importantly, the reversals of REM in the following quarter have an incremental positive effect on future performance, which largely offsets the negative effect of REM. These results provide new evidence on REM reversals that differs from the existing literature. Instead of interpreting the reversals as an indication of true REM based on their negative association with future performance documented in Vorst (2016), our results suggest that REM reversals may be indicative of firms rewinding REM subsequently, which reduces the REM damage to firms’ future operations.     

Earnings quality and short selling: Evidence from real earnings management in the United States

Prior research provides evidence consistent with managers using real earnings management (REM) to increase earnings. This study examines whether short sellers exploit the overvaluation of firms employing REM. I find that firms with more REM have higher subsequent short interest. The positive relation between REM and short interest is more pronounced in settings where the costs associated with accrual‐based earnings management are high, such as when a firm has low accounting flexibility or faces greater scrutiny from a high quality auditor. I also find some evidence that short sellers respond to REM more than to other fundamental signals of firm overvaluation. My inferences are robust to the use of propensity score matching. Collectively, my evidence suggests that short sellers not only trade on REM information, but they also trade as if they understand the substitutive nature of alternative earnings management methods. This study provides additional insight into the important role that short sellers play in monitoring managerial operating decisions and overall earnings quality.     

Employee‐friendly practices,product market competition and firm value

In this paper, we examine whether employee‐friendly practices are associated with product market competition, and whether firm value is related to employee‐friendly practices and product market competition. Using a large sample of US firms, we find positive and significant associations between employee friendliness and product market competition, and between firm value and employee friendliness when product market competition is high, consistent with the value creation theory. Both positive relations hold when we account for corporate governance. In addition, using the list of Fortune's ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ as an alternative measure of employee‐friendly policies, we find firms in more competitive industries are more likely to treat their workers favourably. Furthermore, we find that the market reaction is more positive when firms in more competitive industries are selected for the Fortune list.     

Managerial career concerns and the content of corporate disclosures: An analysis of the tone of earnings press releases

This study examines how the narrative content of corporate disclosures is affected by managers’ career concerns, measured by the enforceability of noncompete provisions in employment contracts. We provide empirical evidence that career concerns lead managers to manipulate the content of corporate disclosures by inflating the tone of earnings press releases to convey a more optimistic picture about the firm’s financial performance. We ensure the causality of our findings by exploiting changes to noncompete enforceability following court rulings. We also show that tone inflation is stronger when CEOs are younger, less capable and less experienced, as well as for managers of firms with more independent boards, more analysts following and better governance.     

Product market competition and corporate advertising expenditure: Evidence from a natural experiment

Using the implementation of “Catalogue for the Guidance of Industries for Foreign Investment” in China in 2015 as an exogenous shock, we adopt the difference-in-differences (DIDs) method to explore the relationship between product market competition and corporate advertising expenditure. The result shows that product market competition significantly promotes corporate advertising expenditure, and the result is robust after conducting a series of robustness tests. In addition, we further examine the effects of product market competition on corporate advertising expenditure in firms with different characteristics. The results show that the effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, small-scale firms, and high-tech firms. Overall, this paper supports that product market competition plays a vital role in promoting corporate advertising expenditure.     

Rank and file equity compensation and earnings management: Evidence from stock options

The widespread use of rank and file equity‐based compensation suggests that executives believe that rank and file employees can affect firm outcomes, and some research supports this view. If equity‐based incentives influence rank and file employees’ productive efforts, they might also influence their earnings management decisions. We find that increases in rank and file employees’ option‐based compensation—our proxy for equity‐based compensation—are associated with increases in earnings management and that this relation is attributable to real activities (as opposed to accrual) earnings management. Cross‐sectional tests indicate that the relation is stronger when rank and file option compensation is likely to generate greater performance incentives and attenuated in the presence of more intense monitoring. Finally, we explore the role of cash constraints and overvaluation as potential alternative explanations for this relation and find that neither accounts for our results.     

Product market competition and analyst forecasting activity: International evidence

In this study, we investigate how product market competition affects the extent of analyst following and the properties of analyst forecasts. Using a broad sample of firms from 37 countries over the 1990–2008 period, we find that firms that operate in more concentrated industries and with stronger pricing power are associated with greater analyst following, higher forecast accuracy, and lower forecast dispersion. Moreover, the effect of product market power on analyst following and forecast properties is more pronounced in countries with less effective competition laws and higher entry costs. These findings suggest that high industry concentration and a dominant market position enhance the earnings predictability of firms and lower their information uncertainty, and that country-level institutions that promote competition effectively constrain the power in product markets.     

Capitalization of R&D costs and earnings management: Evidence from Italian listed companies

The capitalization of research and development (R&D) costs is a controversial accounting issue because of the contention that such capitalization is motivated by incentives to manipulate earnings. Based on a sample of Italian listed companies, this study examines whether companies' decisions to capitalize R&D costs are affected by earnings-management motivations. Italy provides a natural context for testing our hypothesized relationships because Italian GAAP allows for the capitalization of R&D costs. Using a Tobit regression model to test our hypotheses, we show that companies tend to use cost capitalization for earnings-smoothing purposes. The hypothesis that firms capitalize R&D costs to reduce the risk of violating debt covenants is not supported.     

Bank Competition: Measurement,Decision‐Making,and Risk‐Taking

This paper investigates whether greater competition increases or decreases individual bank and banking system risk. Using a new text‐based measure of competition, and an instrumental variables analysis that exploits exogenous variation in bank deregulation, we provide robust evidence that greater competition increases both individual bank risk and a bank's contribution to system‐wide risk. Specifically, we find that higher competition is associated with lower underwriting standards, less timely loan loss recognition, and a shift toward noninterest revenue. Further, we find that higher competition is associated with higher stand‐alone risk of individual banks, greater sensitivity of a bank's downside equity risk to system‐wide distress, and a greater contribution by individual banks to downside risk of the banking sector.     

中央国库现金管理中标利率与货币市场利率关系的实证分析

文章在梳理中央国库现金管理发展及货币市场利率体系的基础上,采用协整方程和误差修正模型实证检验了中央国库现金管理中标利率与同业拆借利率和回购利率之间的协整关系,研究表明其与二者均存在长期协整关系,误差修正模型的调整力度为0.8。文章分析了这种长期趋势存在的现实原因。最后结合实证分析中样本出现的特点,就进一步完善中央国库现金管理提出建议。     

Relating Context Variables to Participative Budgeting and Evaluative Use of Performance Measures: A Meta‐analysis

Extant findings regarding how context variables relate to participative budgeting and the evaluative use of accounting performance measures (APM) are contradictory. Unlike previous reviews of such findings, this empirical article uses a meta‐analysis to examine the relations of context variables with participative budgeting or evaluative use of APM to determine (i) how the variables relate and (ii) which factors might cause between‐correlation variance, such as statistical artefacts or moderating influences of variable measures, sample selection, or industry differences. All meta‐analyses are based on rather small samples. Three groups of context variables emerge. First, some relate significantly and homogeneously to participative budgeting or evaluative use of APM; these direct relations should be considered explicitly in further studies. Second, for some variables, the relations are homogeneous but not significant, such that they are neither simple nor direct. Third, substantial variance exists in the correlations for some context variables; these relations are contingent on other influences. Industry differences and sample selection explain some inconsistencies in exploratory moderator analyses and should receive additional research attention.