Earnings Benchmarks and Enterprises’ Expenditure Manipulation：Evidence from Advertising Expenditures

Abstract

Under the background of the new economic era, great changes have taken place in the business environment faced by enterprises. The business model of enterprises is changing from the “product-centered” model to the “customer-centered” model. In this trend, brand capital has become an essential factor for enterprises to form core competitiveness. As a long-term investment in brand, with the transformation of enterprise business model, the importance of advertising expenditures in enterprise brand building and value promotion is becoming increasingly prominent. Advertising expenditures are generally the research topic in the field of marketing. This paper extends it to the research field of accounting and corporate finance, trying to take advertising expenditures as the research object, uncover the “black box” of enterprise expense manipulation, and explore the enterprise expense manipulation behavior under different earnings benchmarks（avoiding a loss, avoiding an earnings decline, meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts）. And on this basis, we further explore the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation between different enterprises. The results show that enterprises will try to achieve the goal of avoiding a loss by cutting advertising expenditures. However, there is no evidence on enterprises’ advertising expenditure manipulation under the goal of avoiding an earnings decline or meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts. The above conclusions remain unchanged under various robustness tests. Further, the research on the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation to avoid a loss shows that advertising expenditure manipulation is more significant in enterprises with higher advertising expenditure intensity, shorter listing time, analyst tracking and lower tax rate. This paper not only makes a preliminary study on advertising expenditure manipulation in China’s capital market, explores whether advertising expenditures will be used as a means of earnings management under a variety of earnings benchmarks, enriches the academic literature in the field of expenditure manipulation in earnings management, and is helpful to understand the relationship between earnings benchmarks and expenditure manipulation; but also makes a thorough study on the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation under earnings benchmarks, which is helpful to reveal the mechanism behind the expenditure manipulation behavior, and has reference value and enlightenment significance to the subsequent scholars’ research in related fields. In addition, the conclusions of this paper can not only enlighten the participants and regulators of capital market in policy, but also have reference value to understand the relationship between earnings benchmarks and expenditure manipulation in practice.