Accruals Management to Achieve Earnings Benchmarks: A Comparison of Pre-managed Profit and Loss Firms

Abstract:  This study examines whether firms with profits before accruals management are more likely than firms with losses before accruals management to meet or exceed earnings benchmarks when pre-managed earnings are below those benchmarks. We extend Brown (2001) by documenting that the differential propensity to achieve earnings benchmarks by profitable and nonprofitable firms results from differential accruals management behavior. We find that firms with profits before accruals management are more likely than firms with losses before accruals management to have pre-managed earnings below both analysts' forecasts and prior period earnings and reported earnings above these benchmarks.     

How to Create Value Without Earnings: The Case of Amazon

Investors and commentators often equate GAAP accounting metrics, especially earnings per share, with financial success. The reality, however, is that there is no simple, linear relationship between GAAP earnings and intrinsic value, which is defined as the present value of expected future cash flows. And adjustments of GAAP metrics, though admittedly subjective, are often required to understand the economic reality of a business. http://Amazon.com Inc. provides a case study that throws into sharp relief the need to look beyond GAAP in order to analyze underlying fundamentals and value. In this paper, the authors argue that Amazon has done a superb job of building shareholder wealth, all the while reporting low and declining operating and net income margins. The article provides a framework for thinking about Amazon's underlying profitability that is based on the concept of return on capital in relation to the cost of capital, and shows how that profitability has been masked by GAAP accounting. The authors demonstrate that the company is now investing very large amounts of capital with the expectation of earning rates of return well above its cost of capital. And their analysis suggests that if such investment can continue over the long term, Amazon's current market value of $140 billion can be readily justified.     

Mutual Fund Performance Evaluation: A Comparison of Benchmarks and Benchmark Comparisons

The authors' main goal in this paper is to ascertain whether conventional measures of abnormal mutual fund performance are sensitive to the benchmark chosen to measure normal performance. They employ the standard CAPM benchmarks and a variety of APT benchmarks to investigate this question. They find little similarity between the absolute and relative mutual fund rankings obtained from these alternative benchmarks, which suggests the importance of knowing the appropriate model for risk and return in this context. In addition, the rankings are not insensitive to the method used to construct the APT benchmark. Finally, they find statistically significant measured abnormal performance using all the benchmarks. The economic explanation for this phenomenon appears to be an open question.     

The Investment Performance of Common Stocks in Relation to Their Price–Earnings Ratios: An Update of the Basu Study

In this paper, the relationship between the investment performances of equity securities and their price–earnings ratios is examined using an approach similar to the one employed by Basu in a 1977 paper. From the tests, we conclude that, from 1979 through 1984, there were some moderate excess rates of return earned by selecting stocks based on their price–earnings ratios but that these excess rates were not obtained from investing in low price–earnings stocks.     

Market Reaction to Multiple Contemporaneous Earnings Signals: Earnings Announcements and Future Earnings Guidance

We examine market reactions to contemporaneous announcements of current earnings and future earnings guidance for evidence on how investors trade off relevance and reliability. Current earnings are more reliable than future earnings guidance, but future earnings guidance may be more relevant for predicting future performance. We find that current earnings are more strongly associated with announcement-period returns than concurrently disclosed future earnings guidance, consistent with investors’ relative preference for reliability. We find similar return reactions to stand-alone earnings and to earnings released with guidance. In contrast, return reactions are lower for guidance announced simultaneously with current earnings than for stand-alone guidance.     

When the Use of Positive Language Backfires: The Joint Effect of Tone,Readability, and Investor Sophistication on Earnings Judgments

Recent studies document that market participants react positively to the positive language sentiment or tone embedded in financial disclosures, and that investors’ reactions to negative news are more muted with poor disclosure readability. However, while language sentiment and readability co‐occur in practice, their joint effects remain largely unexplored. In an experiment with MBA students as participants, we investigate how the effect of language sentiment varies with readability and investor sophistication level. We find that language sentiment influences investors’ judgments when readability is low, but not when readability is high. Specifically, when readability is low, disclosures couched in positive language lead to higher earnings judgments for less sophisticated investors, but lower earnings judgments for more sophisticated investors. These findings show that the main effects of readability and language sentiment documented in prior studies have boundary effects, and may reverse when both variables are jointly considered along with investor sophistication.     

很行绩效考核机制的转变趋势

经济资本作为当今国际银行业的风险管理文化和先进管理工具,正在受到国内商业银行的重视,各家银行的改革和转型无不将经济资本理念的引入和实务运作作为改革的一项核心工作.经济资本能够以推测的数值直观而比较准确地反映银行承担风险和覆盖风险的能力,能够通过经济增加值(EVA)以及风险调整资本收益率(RAROC)等量化指标反映银行不同机构部门、不同业务、不同产品、不同客户的价值创造能力.因此,经济资本不仅是银行科学风险管理体系的基础,更在绩效评价和考核体系中发挥着核心作用.     

Investors' Reactions to Management Earnings Guidance: The Joint Effect of Investment Position, News Valence, and Guidance Form

We report the results of an experiment that shows that investors' earnings- and investment-related judgments are jointly influenced by their investment position (long versus short), the news valence of guidance issued by management, and the amount of ambiguity in the guidance. Prior research indicates that guidance form (point versus range) has no effect on investors' earnings estimates made in reaction to management guidance. We extend this research by showing that guidance form matters, conditional on investment position and news valence. Similarly, prior research indicates that investors who hold long (short) positions in a stock are more optimistic (pessimistic) about the company's prospects. We extend this research by showing that the effect of investment position documented in prior studies is conditional on news valence and guidance form. We contribute to prior literature on the effects of investment position and guidance form by delineating boundary conditions for each of these effects.     

Use of Forecasts of Earnings to Estimate and Compare Cost of Capital Across Regimes

Abstract:   I critically examine several of the methods used in the recent literature to estimate and compare the cost of capital across different accounting/regulatory regimes. I focus on the central importance of expectations of growth beyond the short period for which forecasts of future pay‐offs (dividends and/or earnings) are available. I illustrate, using the stocks that comprised the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) at December 31, 2004, as an example, the differences between the growth rates implied by the data, and growth rates that are often assumed in the literature. My analyses show that assumptions about growth beyond the (short) forecast horizon may seriously affect the estimates of the expected rate of return and may lead to spurious inferences.     

衍生产品使用对公司价值和业绩影响的实证检验

本文在回顾企业使用衍生产品相关理论的基础上，分析了中国上市公司使用衍生产品现状，并以深沪两市有色金属加工或生产行业上市公司为研究样本，实证检验中国上市公司使用衍生产品进行风险管理是否提高了公司价值和业绩，结果发现中国企业使用衍生产品并没有像西方理论所认为的那样可以提升公司价值，其原因在于国内企业使用衍生产品的负面影响抵消了其正面作用，所以无法起到提升公司价值的作用。在此基础上，文章提出了相关的政策建议。     

Driven to Distraction: Extraneous Events and Underreaction to Earnings News

Recent studies propose that limited investor attention causes market underreactions. This paper directly tests this explanation by measuring the information load faced by investors. The  investor distraction hypothesis  holds that extraneous news inhibits market reactions to relevant news. We find that the immediate price and volume reaction to a firm's earnings surprise is much weaker, and post-announcement drift much stronger, when a greater number of same-day earnings announcements are made by other firms. We evaluate the economic importance of distraction effects through a trading strategy, which yields substantial alphas. Industry-unrelated news and large earnings surprises have a stronger distracting effect.     

A Test of the Relative Pricing Effects of Dividends and Earnings: Evidence from Simultaneous Announcements in Japan

We study the pricing effects of dividend and earnings announcements by taking advantage of the unique setting in Japan where managers simultaneously announce the current year's dividends and earnings as well as forecasts of next year's dividends and earnings. Defining surprises as deviations from analysts' forecasts, we find that share price reactions are significantly affected by earnings surprises, especially management forecasts of next year's earnings. The information content of dividends is marginal and is restricted to announcements of next year's dividends. Consistent with Modigliani and Miller's dividend irrelevance proposition, current dividend surprises have no material impact on stock prices in Japan.     

Real Earnings Management,Institutional Environment,and Future Operating Performance: An International Study

This paper investigates the association between firms' engagement in real activities manipulation (hereafter REM) on future firm performance in an international setting, and whether the association is conditional upon country-level institutional factor. Our inquiry is motivated by a paucity of research on the consequences of REM in an international setting. Using a large sample over the period of 2001 to 2015, we find that current-period REM is positively associated with future performance: a finding that is consistent with Gunny (2010) in the US. Importantly, we find that the positive performance effect is driven by firms operating in countries with strong institutional environments. Finally, we find that future operating performance improves when REM is undertaken by firms in strong institutional environments only during a non-economic crisis period, but not during an economic crisis period. The paper adds to the existing REM literature by showing a non-monotonic effect of REM on future performance that is conditional on the strength of a country's institution. We also contribute to the accounting information and crisis literature by documenting a time-variant effect of REM on future performance.     

Earnings management to exceed thresholds: Evidence from Singapore and Thailand

Earnings play a vital role in portraying a company's economic health. Hence, executives have incentives to manage earnings. Motivated by Degeorge et al. [Degeorge, F., Patel, J., Zeckhauser, R., 1999. Earnings management to exceed thresholds. Journal of Business 72, 1–33] and Burgstahler and Dichev [Burgstahler, D., Dichev, I., 1997. Earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses. Journal of Accounting and Economics 24, 99–126], this study applies the behavioral framework developed by Degeorge et al. [Degeorge, F., Patel, J., Zeckhauser, R., 1999. Earnings management to exceed thresholds. Journal of Business 72, 1–33] to investigate earnings management to exceed thresholds in Singapore and Thailand. The empirical evidence reveals that earnings management exists in Singapore and Thailand to avoid reporting losses and negative earnings growth. This earnings management practice, however, varies between financial and non-financial firms, between Singaporean and Thai firms, and between before and after the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Moreover, corporate governance structure is found to impact the extent of earnings management to exceed thresholds in Singapore.     

Renegotiation and Relative Performance Evaluation: Why an Informative Signal May Be Useless

Although Holmström's informativeness criterionprovides a theoretical foundation for the controllability principleand interfirm relative performance evaluation, empirical and fieldstudies provide only weak evidence on such practices. This paperrefines the traditional informativeness criterion by abandoning theconventional full-commitment assumption. With the possibility ofrenegotiation, a signal's usefulness in incentive contractingdepends on its information quality, not simply on whether the signalis informative. This paper derives conditions for determining when asignal is useless and when it is useful. In particular, theseconditions will be met when the signal's information quality iseither sufficiently poor or sufficiently rich. (JEL C72,D82).     

Executive Compensation, Strategic Competition, and Relative Performance Evaluation: Theory and Evidence

We examine compensation contracts for managers in imperfectly competitive product markets. We show that strategic interactions among firms can explain the lack of relative performance-based incentives in which compensation decreases with rival firm performance. The need to soften product market competition generates an optimal compensation contract that places a positive weight on both own and rival performance. Firms in more competitive industries place greater weight on rival firm performance relative to own firm performance. We find empirical evidence of a positive sensitivity of compensation to rival firm performance that is increasing in the degree of competition in the industry.     

The Role of Corporate Sustainability and Its Consistency on Firm Financial Performance: Canadian Evidence*

This paper investigates the impact of corporate sustainability and the consistency of corporate sustainability efforts on firm financial performance in Canada. Using data on 266 Canadian companies over the 2007–2017 period, we find a significantly positive association between corporate sustainability performance and firm financial performance. In addition, we find that companies that perform consistently well on sustainability (i.e., consistent performers) achieve better financial performance compared to inconsistent performers. Thus, far from their being net costs/expenses, our results indicate that corporate sustainability performance and consistency in sustainability performance both provide net benefits and significantly impact financial performance positively, implying that corporate sustainability not only helps address the needs of the current and future generations but also has a positive effect on the corporate bottom line. Taken together, our results suggest that not only does corporate sustainability have a positive effect on firm performance, but better financial performance may be achieved through a committed—rather than a “tokenism”—approach to corporate sustainability.