Economic Relations Among Earnings Quality Measures

Empirical studies on earnings quality use various measures that capture particular dimensions of earnings quality. This paper provides a theoretical foundation to evaluate and compare several common earnings quality measures: value relevance; persistence; predictability; smoothness; and discretionary accruals. We use a rational expectations framework in which a manager has market price, earnings, and smoothing incentives and can bias earnings reports. Taking the information content of reported earnings as a natural benchmark, we determine how variations of management incentives, operating risk, and accounting noise affect earnings quality and examine whether the different measures point in the same or in the opposite direction. We find that value relevance and persistence are measures that are closely aligned with each other and with our benchmark, followed by predictability and smoothness. Discretionary accruals measures are less aligned because they are based on the level of accruals, which confounds their information content. Our results also support the notion that smoother earnings and higher discretionary accruals are associated with greater earnings quality.     

Distress Risk,Growth and Earnings Quality

We extend and complement prior work by investigating the earnings quality of firms with different financial health characteristics and growth prospects. By using three alternative measures of default likelihood and two alternative measures of growth options, without being limited to a specific event, we provide a more comprehensive setup for analysing the earnings characteristics of the universe of firms than examining distressed firms with persistent losses, dividend reductions or bankruptcy‐filings. Our dataset consists of 15,049 healthy U.S. firms over the period 1990–2004. Results show that the relation between earnings quality and financial health is not monotonic. Distressed firms have a low level of earnings timeliness for bad news and a high level for good news, and manage earnings toward a positive target more frequently than healthy firms. On the other hand, healthy firms have a high level of earnings timeliness for bad news. Growth aspects play an important role in a firm's ability to manage earnings. In contrast to the findings of prior studies, growth firms have greater earnings timeliness for bad news, whereas value firms manage earnings toward a positive target more frequently than growth firms.     

投资者保护与收益质量:国际比较研究

本文主要利用实证和国际比较的方法研究了外部投资者保护对上市公司收益质量的影响,以及我国投资者保护和收益质量在国际上所处的水平,并对如何通过提高投资者保护水平以提高上市公司收益质量提出了建议.     

Earnings attributes and investor-protection: International evidence

This study explores the effects of investor-protection on reported earnings quality assessed on the basis of four accounting-based earnings attributes (accruals quality, earnings persistence, earnings predictability, and earnings smoothness). We test the hypothesis that favorable values of each earnings attribute (considered individually) occur in countries whose institutional characteristics provide relatively strong investor-protection. The results based on K-means cluster analysis of institutional characteristics are mixed. Earnings smoothness is less prevalent in strong investor-protection countries, as hypothesized. However both accruals quality and earnings predictability are better in countries whose institutional characteristics are relatively weak. No association is found between investor-protection and earnings persistence, except that countries with low ownership concentration appear to have high earnings persistence. The results based on regression analysis are consistent with those based on the cluster analysis. These results imply that conclusions about the impact of institutional characteristics on earnings quality depend on how earnings quality is measured.     

Earnings Co-movements and the Informativeness of Earnings

We examine the informativeness of earnings in the presence of earnings co-movements. Many theoretical studies infer that the more a firm's earnings move with the market the less weight investors need to place on those earnings, thus rendering them less informative. On the other hand, managers have less opportunity to bias the earnings signal the more earnings co-move, making them more reliable. We measure earnings co-movement using an industry–firm pairing correlational technique. Overall our results show both the degree of co-movement and the ordering of earnings announcements impacts on the informativeness of earnings as indicated by earnings response coefficients. Earnings responses are larger for firms that report earnings before their most highly correlated industry peer, but the responses are reduced as earnings co-movement increases. We interpret our results to indicate that the more earnings co-move with an industry peer the less informative earnings become, but only when the peer firm is able to obtain information at a later date.     

Earnings management and earnings quality

Viewing the detection of earnings management from the perspective of a crime scene investigator sheds new light on prior research on earnings management and its close relative, earnings quality. The works of Ball and Shivakumar [2008. Earnings quality at initial public offerings. Journal of Accounting and Economics, in press.] and Teoh et al. [1998. Earnings management and the subsequent market performance of initial public offerings. Journal of Finance 53, 1935–1974.] are used to illustrate the application of seven components of a crime scene investigation to earnings management research.     

终极产权性质、第一大股东对盈余质量的影响分析

以我国2006年底已经实施了股改的深沪两地A股上市公司2007～2008年的经验数据为样本,采用收益-盈余模型检验了终极产权性质、第一大股东与盈余质量之间的关系,研究发现:对于已经实施了股改的上市公司,股权仍然相对集中;当上市公司属于国家终极控制时,盈余质量会较高;第一大股东持股比例与盈余质量正相关;第一大股东对上市公司董事会的控制能力与盈余质量正相关;其他大股东对控股股东的制衡能力对盈余质量的影响不显著.     

Non-GAAP Earnings Disclosures on the Face of the Income Statement by UK Firms: The Effect on Market Liquidity

This study benefits by a special feature of the UK information environment which allows UK firms to disclose non-GAAP earnings on the face of the income statement to examine two interrelated questions. First, we ask whether the decision to disclose non-GAAP earnings on the face of the income statement is related to the firm's financial performance and corporate governance characteristics, and second, we investigate the effect of this disclosure decision on market liquidity. Using a dataset of 1227 hand-collected firm-year observations during the period 2006–2013, we show that better governed firms and firms with weaker financial performance are more likely to disclose non-GAAP earnings. Our evidence also suggests that this disclosure is associated with increased levels of market liquidity and the results hold after controlling for self-selection bias. We conclude that firms' decision to disclose non-GAAP earnings on the face of the income statement is more consistent with the incentive to provide information than to mislead the market.     

Earnings persistence, accruals and managerial share ownership

We investigate the relationship between earnings persistence and a broad measure of total accruals (TACC). We propose and find that in Australia, TACC is less persistent than cash flows. We further propose that the persistence of accrual components is positively associated with the reliability of those components. However, we find that the least reliable accrual component has the greatest persistence and suggest possible reasons for this. We then investigate the relationship between earnings persistence and managerial share ownership, but find no evidence of a consistent, strong relationship. Rather, for the non-current operating accruals we find evidence consistent with incentive alignment for large firms with high operating cash flows, whereas for small firms we find evidence consistent with efficient contracting.     

Earnings quality at initial public offerings

We show that, contrary to popular belief, initial public offering (IPO) firms report more conservatively. We attribute this to the higher quality reporting demanded of public firms by financial statement users and consequentially higher monitoring by auditors, boards, analysts, rating agencies, press, and litigants, and to greater regulatory scrutiny [Ball, R., Shivakumar, L., 2005. Earnings quality in UK private firms: comparative loss recognition timeliness. Journal of Accounting and Economics 39, 83–128]. We also question the evidence of Teoh et al. [1998b. Earnings management and the subsequent market performance of initial public offerings. Journal of Finance 53, 1935–1974] supporting the alternative hypothesis that managers opportunistically inflate earnings to influence IPO pricing. We conjecture that upward-biased estimates of “discretionary” accruals occur in a broad genre of studies on earnings management around similar large transactions and events.     

高管身份特征对盈余质量影响的实证研究

依据"高管阶梯理论",选用沪市A股2007～2011年上市公司作为研究样本,在调整基于盈余反应系数的盈余质量评价模型的基础上,加入与上市公司高管身份特征相关的研究变量,分析了上市公司高管身份特征对企业盈余质量的影响,研究发现:上市公司高管性别对盈余质量有不十分显著的影响;上市公司高管年龄与公司盈余质量之间呈现显著的正相关性;上市公司高管学历与公司盈余质量之间也呈现显著的正相关性。     

区域竞争与商业银行的盈余质量——基于我国商业银行的经验证据

本文运用2002-2014年间我国商业银行的数据,实证检验了银行业区域竞争程度对商业银行盈余质量的影响。研究结果显示,商业银行的区域竞争程度越高,银行的盈余质量水平越低。进一步,从银行规模和上市情况来看,随着竞争的加剧,规模较小的商业银行以及非上市的商业银行更倾向于进行盈余管理。同时,区域竞争对商业银行盈余质量的负向影响在由小所进行审计的银行中更加显著。本文的研究不仅丰富了商业银行盈余质量的影响因素及银行竞争的经济后果等方面的文献,还能在一定程度上深化利益相关者对我国商业银行盈余质量的认识。     

Earnings quality and corporate cash holdings

Poor earnings quality exacerbates information asymmetry between internal and external stakeholders of a firm. Agency considerations then persuade investors to discount the value of corporate cash holdings out of concern about the inappropriate use of funds. In this study, we show that poor earnings quality has a negative impact on the value of corporate cash holdings and a positive impact on the level of cash reserves. We find that the negative effect of poor earnings quality either neutralizes or more than offsets the positive effect of excess cash on firm value. Our results are robust to several measures of earnings quality and model specifications.     

Earnings response coefficients of OECD banks: Tests extended to include bank risk factors

We investigate two issues: Do share prices of banks in European markets respond to unexpected accounting earnings disclosures? Are share prices as well as unexpected earnings changes correlated with bank-relevant risk factors? Results reveal that bank share prices respond to unexpected earnings changes at the time of accounting reports in the same manner as the shares of the more widely-researched non-bank firms. Apart from finding significant earnings response coefficients in eight countries, we find that credit risk, price risk, exchange rate risk, and solvency risk are significantly correlated with share price changes. Third, three bank risk factors are significantly correlated with unexpected earnings changes. These results are obtained after corrections for several statistical and econometric problems so our reported parameters are robust, certainly more so than in earlier studies using ordinary least square regressions. These new findings extend earnings response literature to several banking sectors, and also identify bank's key risk factors.     

Voluntary Disclosure of Internal Control Weakness and Earnings Quality: Evidence From China

Using a sample of 1059 listed firms that voluntarily provide internal control reports in the period 2010–2011, this paper investigates the relationship between voluntary disclosure of internal control weaknesses (ICWs) and earnings quality in China. Our results show that earnings quality, measured by absolute discretionary accruals, is significantly associated with voluntary disclosure of ICWs. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that both accounting-related and non-accounting-related ICWs affect earnings quality. This study contributes to the internal control literature by extending the evidence for ICW disclosure to an emerging economy and examining the impact of disclosure of different types of ICWs on earnings quality. This study demonstrates that the control of non-accounting-related ICWs is critical for enterprise risk management.     

卖空与盈余质量——来自财务重述的证据

本文利用2006-2014年中国A股上市公司数据,运用双重差分和安慰剂检验,考察卖空对财务重述的影响。研究发现,加入融券标的后,相较于不能被卖空的公司,融券标的公司发生财务重述的可能性显著降低,这种治理作用在金融市场欠发达和治理水平较差的公司更加明显。进一步研究发现,卖空机制可以通过增加激励合约的有效性和吸引分析师跟踪来减少财务重述。最后,使用可操控应计项目和是否报告微利作为盈余质量的代理变量进行稳健性检验,发现上述结论依然成立。因此,放开卖空限制,有助于改善上市公司信息披露质量和完善公司治理结构。     

Earnings Virality

We examine the determinants and market consequences associated with earnings announcements going viral on social media, a phenomenon we label “earnings virality.” Using a comprehensive panel of historical Twitter data, we find that the typical earnings announcement receives relatively little social media coverage, but others go viral on social media, quickly reaching the feeds of millions of people. We find that viral earnings announcements generally have Twitter content that is more extreme in tone and contains less unique content. Further, earnings virality is positively associated with revenue surprises, investor recognition, retail investor ownership, and retail investor trading around the announcement. Earnings virality appears to be detrimental to markets, as it coincides with lower market liquidity and slower price formation. Overall, our evidence suggests that user-driven dissemination through social media platforms, when amplified and taken to extreme levels, may be harmful to markets.     

Do Japanese Analysts Overreact or Underreact to Earnings Announcements?

Several recent studies have used U.S. analysts' forecasts to test for underreaction or overreaction to information in earnings announcements. These tests have provided mixed results. Evidence in Mendenhall (1991) is that analysts underreact. By contrast. results in De Bondt and Thaler (1990) show overreaction by U.S. financial analysts to earnings announcements. The current study contributes to this topic by examining over/underreaction by Japanese financial analysts. Test results show that Japanese analysts do not overreact to earnings announcements, market to book ratios and sales growth. Instead. there is strong evidence that Japanese analysts underreact to earnings announcements and that their underreaction is more pronounced for firms with mostly permanent earnings. Our results also show that Japanese analysts display larger forecast biases for earnings reported under U.S. GAAP as opposed to Japanese GAAP. Finally, we find that US. analysts discount information in earnings announcements to a larger degree (relying to a greater extent on information in past prices instead) when compared to their Japanese counterparts. Further, in contrast to their Japanese counterparts, these analysts display no optimistic bias. The results above suggest that the impact of each country's unique culture and capital norms will have to be taken into account by policy makers in evaluating the feasibility of harmonization of accounting standards.     

应计与真实盈余管理：替代抑或互补

基于中国转型经济特有的制度环境,考察应计与真实盈余管理之间的相互关系。结果表明,在中国市场上,应计与真实盈余管理之间存在"二元"关系,即替代关系和互补关系。具体而言,市场竞争压力在应计与真实盈余管理之间具有明显的成本比较优势,使得两者具有替代关系。控制利益、管制压力在应计与真实盈余管理之间不具有显著的成本比较优势,而是应计与真实盈余管理的驱动因素,使得两者具有互补关系。     

Accounting Earnings Announcements and Differential Predisclosure Information

Recent studies have detected an inverse association between a firm's size and the stock price reaction to the firm's accounting earnings announcements, which has been interpreted as evidence that larger firms have relatively richer information sets. This study expands on this work, using two firm-specific factors to capture both the time and flow-per-period elements of information production (period of listing and firm size respectively) and examines whether these variables are a better information proxy than is size alone. After controlling for firm size, a statistically significant inverse relationship between a firm's period of listing and the information content of its annual earnings announcement is detected. The findings have implications for standard-setters as well as for auditors'assessment of the risk associated with audits of newly listed firms.