Earnings Overstatement Research Articles

Earnings management, horizon problem, and advisor posts for retiring CEOs

An advisor post is one of the most important post-retirement careers for a chief executive officer (CEO). Using unique hand-collected data on advisor posts in Japanese listed firms, we examine whether retiring CEOs overstate earnings to acquire an advisor post. Consistent with the horizon problem, we find that earnings overstatement is greater in the year immediately before the CEO's post-retirement career is determined to be an advisor. This relation is also more (less) pronounced for firms with weaker (stronger) internal monitoring. These results suggest that retiring CEOs choose income-increasing accounting to acquire an advisor position, and such opportunistic accounting choice is more (less) pronounced in firms with weaker (stronger) internal monitoring.

How Changes in Expectations of Earnings Affect the Associations of Earnings Overstatements and Audit Effort with Audit Risk and Market Price*

ABSTRACTIn this study, we provide theoretical guidance for both analytical research and empirical research by considering how changing expectations of earnings affect a dishonest manager's strategy to overstate earnings and an auditor's strategy to exert effort in a two‐period setting. We expect our study's insights on changing economic conditions to help shape future research. We model the manager type as either honest or dishonest, which allows us to differentiate audit risk from audit effort. The key takeaways for future research are the insights on how changes in payoffs and expected earnings affect the associations that involve earnings overstatements and audit effort with audit risk and market price. For instance, researchers typically assume audit effort and audit risk are negatively associated, but we find the association can be positive when, for example, the auditor chooses a period 2 strategy based on the changes in period 1 game parameters. The results of our study provide two additional key insights on the design of future empirical tests. First, by dichotomizing, we show the importance of estimating the intercept in the market pricing equation when studying earnings quality, because market price also adjusts for expected bias through changes in the intercept. Second, our multiperiod setting demonstrates that the effects from a change in the manager's or auditor's incentives in period 1 may reverse in period 2. Empirical studies typically examine the contemporaneous effects of these changes on market price and/or audit risk but fail to identify the cross‐temporal effects we document in our study.

CEO Employment Contract Horizon and Financial Reporting Discretion

ABSTRACT We examine the effect of employment contract horizon on managers' discretion in financial reporting. During the contract horizon, the board learns about a new CEO's ability from realized firm performance and uses this information to determine whether to renew or terminate the CEO's contract. Economic theory suggests that the informational value of firm performance to the board's learning declines over time as the board's estimate of the CEO's ability becomes more precise; this motivates a CEO to overstate earnings more aggressively during the earlier stage of the contract horizon. Consistently, we find more (less) aggressive earnings overstatement during the earlier (later) stage of the first contract horizon. This finding is stronger for CEOs who have greater concerns over contract termination and CEOs who have greater flexibility to manipulate earnings. Our evidence suggests that the CEO employment contract horizon has a significant impact on managerial discretion in financial reporting. JEL Classification: G34; J41; M40; M41.

Analysis of Market Failure Theories Based on Toshiba’s Business Ethic Issue: Earnings Overstatement Scandal

As a controversial topic, business ethic is becoming significantly important in today’s business world. Business unethical behaviors such as fraud scandal and other accounting manipulation will bring reputation risks for organizations, which may lead to serious consequences and even severe administrative penalties. Therefore, responsible firms should have senses of good behavior and prevent themselves from committing unethical behaviors, which causing negative externalities for other organizations and people. This research paper mainly conducts research through investigation, literature review and other methods, aiming at demonstrating responsible global citizenship implications by analyzing related market failure theories based on Toshiba’s business ethic issue: earnings overstatement scandal.

How Changing Economic Conditions Over Multiple Periods Affect Earnings Overstatements, Audit Risk, and Market Prices

In this study, we consider how changing expectations of earnings affect a dishonest manager’s strategy to overstate earnings and an auditor’s strategy to exert effort in a two-period setting. We model the manager type as either honest or dishonest, which allows us to differentiate audit risk from audit effort. Researchers typically assume audit effort and audit risk are negatively associated, which we find for changes in our period 2 payoff parameters, but we find the association can be positive, specifically with changes in our period 1 game parameters. Further, by dichotomizing, we show that the directional change in market price does not necessarily follow the directional change in audit effort as the prior literature suggests, because market price also adjusts for expected bias through changes in the intercept. A key finding is that when period 1 expected earnings increase, the probability that the manager is dishonest decreases, which allows the auditor to reduce audit effort. This finding suggests that observations of earnings that just meet or beat an earnings target and suspected of being managed may not be indicative of an audit failure, but indicative of an efficient allocation of effort. Finally, our multiperiod setting demonstrates that the effects from a change in the manager’s or auditor’s incentives in period 1 may reverse in period 2. Studies typically examine the contemporaneous effects of these changes on market price and/or audit risk, but fail to identify the cross-temporal effects we document in our study.

Earnings management and performance of management buyouts

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of pre-acquisition earnings management on the performance of private firm management buyouts.Design/methodology/approachThe study examines 291 UK private firms acquired by their managers between 2004 and 2012. Earnings management is investigated by means of cross-sectional discretionary accruals models, and estimated discretionary accruals are regressed on performance changes in the three years following acquisition.FindingsManagement buyouts of private firms are preceded by earnings overstatement and followed by performance deterioration. Private equity sponsored firms engage less in earnings management and remain more profitable than non-sponsored buyouts. Upward earnings managers cease to outperform industry after second post-buyout year, while aggressive earnings managers do not outperform industry at all. Discretionary total accruals are inversely associated with performance changes in the three years after buyout, and explain over 4 per cent of the changes in performance.Research limitations/implicationsPertinent to the utilisation of private firms and their exemption from publishing cash flow statement, the study relies on accrual-based models for tests of earnings management.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the mergers and acquisitions literature and value creation debate in buyouts by providing the first tests of earnings management and post-acquisition performance in private firm management buyouts.

What Does CEOs’ Pay-for-Performance Reveal about Shareholders’ Attitude toward Earnings Overstatements?

What Does CEOs’ Pay-for-Performance Reveal about Shareholders’ Attitude toward Earnings Overstatements?

How Test Power Impacts Research Relevance: The Case of Earnings Management Research

We argue that the broader applicability of accounting research is often limited by the way accounting researchers typically place far greater weight on the relative cost of type I versus type II errors. To illustrate the extent of this problem, we examine the performance of simple financial ratio-type analysis for detecting earnings overstatements when the total misclassification costs are minimized subject to the relative cost of type I versus type II errors. We then contrast the likelihood of type I versus type II errors from this approach with those arising from several widely used measures of unexpected accruals. The results demonstrate how commonly-used unexpected accruals measures reduce the type I error rate by sacrificing the type II error rate. Given that accounting information users and auditors typically face much higher costs of type II errors, we explicitly identify why unexpected accruals models are likely far less useful in detecting earnings overstatements than a relatively simple approach using financial statement analysis red flags. Our results highlight the fundamentally contrasting incentives facing accounting researchers relative to those who might otherwise use the research in practice, and serve as a warning when the broader relevance of accounting research is increasingly under question.

Financial Reporting Quality and Auditor Locality Contagion

SUMMARY Research in information economics seeks to understand how the actions of one individual affect the decisions of related individuals. We examine this issue in the context of information contagion between audit offices in the same locality. Specifically, we investigate whether contagion among Big N audit offices in the same metropolitan statistical area (MSA) causes their client firms' financial reporting quality to correlate. We document a relation between overstatement of earnings for one firm (as evidenced by a subsequent restatement) and higher abnormal accruals for another firm in that same year, where both firms' auditors are located in the same MSA. The correlation in reporting quality is consistent with contagion in practices between auditors. We also find evidence that auditor competition is one channel through which information contagion occurs. The between-audit office contagion we document is incremental to within-audit office contagion documented by prior research. Our evidence is important in understanding additional factors related to the quality of auditing and financial reporting and thus should be relevant to audit committees, regulators attempting to improve audit quality, and stakeholders in general.

Industry Specific and Task Specific Auditing Expertise: The Case of Goodwill Impairment

There is growing interest among academics and auditing regulators on the role of auditing on the quality of accounting estimates including goodwill impairment. Prior research shows that managers exercise discretion when recording goodwill impairment by either delaying the decision to record the impairment, and/or understating the amount of impairment leading to overstatement of earnings. This study examines how auditor industry expertise, measured as within-industry market share, and task specific expertise, measured as the extent of auditor’s prior experience with goodwill impairment, mitigates managerial discretion. We find no evidence of an association between industry expertise and goodwill impairment. We find that task specific expertise reduces managerial discretion related to the impairment. Specifically, prior experience with goodwill impairment is positively associated with both the likelihood of recording impairment loss as well as the amount of impairment. Our findings have implications for ongoing discussions about auditor characteristics affecting the quality of accounting estimates.

The Effect of Firm Ownership on the Relation between CEO Turnover and Earnings Management

The Effect of Firm Ownership on the Relation between CEO Turnover and Earnings Management

What Does CEOs’ Pay-for-Performance Reveal About Shareholders’ Attitude Toward Earnings Overstatements?

If overstatements were a symptom of the agency conflict, pay-for-performance sensitivities should have increased in response to the additional penalties for misreporting imposed by SOX. Our finding of their decrease is inconsistent with the view that overstatements were an unintended consequence of incentive pay prior to 2002. To corroborate our interpretation, we show that (i) CEO pay-for-performance sensitivities are higher among firms whose shareholders stand to benefit from overstatements; (ii) this cross-sectional relationship weakens significantly after SOX; and (iii) the within-firm decrease in pay-for-performance sensitivity is most pronounced among firms with high pre-SOX shareholder benefits from overstatements.

Is Corporate Fraud Risk Correctly Priced by the Market?

In this paper we investigate the impact of fraud risk -- measured by the probability for earnings overstatements -- on a firms future stock market performance. Based on an out-of-sample estimation of individual firms' fraud risk, we find that stocks with higher fraud risk earn significantly lower stock market returns. A trading strategy going long in stocks of firms with low fraud risk and short in stocks of firms with high fraud risk delivers a statistically significant alpha of more than 10% per year. This result is robust to controlling for differences in firms' liquidity, downside risk, or investor preferences. Our results suggest that the market does not efficiently price corporate fraud risk. Limits of arbitrage do not explain our results. Furthermore, abnormal returns are higher after periods of high sentiment, suggesting that the return patterns documented here constitute an anomaly.

The Effects of Conservative Reporting on Investor Disagreement

We examine whether the level of a firm's conditional conservatism affects investor disagreement around earnings announcement dates. Investor disagreement is relevant for its repercussions on stock market efficiency. However, the literature related to the effect of firms’ reporting policies on disagreement is scant. Prior research suggests that conservatism, by requiring higher verifiability of profits, constrains earnings overstatements and encourages more complete revelations of losses, thus improving the information environment. In this paper, we further hypothesize that these effects of conservatism enhance news credibility and decrease information asymmetry, particularly for bad news announcements. This results in a lower disagreement and improved interpretation of earnings news. We consistently find that conservatism measures are negatively associated with proxies of announcement-time investor disagreement and that this effect is stronger when the firm is reporting bad news. Additional analyses indicate that the impact of conservatism is stronger when market surprise to the announcement is greater, while it is weaker in the presence of frequent and precise voluntary disclosure that preempts the earnings announcement. Finally, we show that a higher percentage of institutional investors’ ownership and a higher level of commitment to conservatism reinforce the impact of the latter.

Audit Committee Characteristics and Accounting Conservatism

This study examines the association between four pivotal audit committee characteristics and accounting conservatism. Using a sample of 7,668 Australian firm‐year observations from 2004 to 2012, a positive association is found between accounting conservatism and: (a) a director with financial expertise on the audit committee; (b) an experienced director on the audit committee; and (c) frequency of audit committee meetings. Within an agency theoretical framework, results suggest that audit committees act as effective monitoring mechanisms in restricting management's opportunistic behaviour and overstatement of earnings. Results also suggest that regulators (and other stakeholders) should pay greater attention to the financial expertise, experience of members and meeting frequency of the audit committee when judging the committee's value.

CEO tenure and earnings management

This study examines changes in CEOs׳ incentive to manage their firms׳ reported earnings during their tenure. Earnings overstatement is greater in the early years than in the later years of CEOs׳ service, and this relation is less pronounced for firms with greater external and internal monitoring. These results suggest that new CEOs try to favorably influence the market׳s perception of their ability in their early years of service, when the market is more uncertain. Also, consistent with the horizon problem, earnings overstatement is greater in the CEOs׳ final year, but this result obtains only after controlling for earnings overstatement in their early years of service.

Tax Refunds on Overstated Earnings: A Valuation Puzzle

The number of financial statement restatements practically doubled from 1998 to 2002 (Huron Consulting Group, ). Approximately 37% of these restatements are related to revenue recognition, with most of these resulting in an original overstatement of earnings. From 2000 to 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on average, issued 200 Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs) each year (see SEC.gov). Most AAERs lead to restatements. While prior literature focused on the negative consequences to firms from reporting a restatement, the authors' study looks for a mitigating effect from reporting good news along with the bad.

Corporate Governance, Auditing, and Reporting Distortions

Conventional wisdom suggests that independent boards limit earnings distortions and promote accurate reporting. In contrast, this study indicates that having insiders on boards enhances reporting integrity. The central result is that strengthening board independence curtails earnings overstatements but heightens the likelihood of understatements. This asymmetry occurs because reinforcing board independence on one hand limits the CEO’s ability to overreport but on the other hand encourages the auditor to rely on the board’s monitoring and consequently economize on effort. The reduced effort impairs the auditor’s ability to verify high earnings and, because auditors favor conservative reports when in doubt, leads to increased incidence of conservative understatements.

The Misrepresentation of Earnings

We ask nearly 400 CFOs about the definition and drivers of earnings quality, with a special emphasis on the prevalence and detection of earnings misrepresentation. CFOs believe that the hallmarks of earnings quality are sustainability, absence of one-time items, and backing by actual cash flows. Earnings quality is determined in about equal measure by controllable factors like internal controls and corporate governance, and non-controllable factors like industry membership and macroeconomic conditions. On earnings misrepresentation, CFOs believe that in any given period a remarkable 20% of firms intentionally distort earnings, even though they are adhering to generally accepted accounting principles. The economic magnitude of the misrepresentation is large, averaging about 10% of reported earnings. While most misrepresentation involves earnings overstatement, interestingly, one third of the firms that are misrepresenting performance are low-balling their earnings or reversing a prior intentional overstatement. Finally, CFOs provide a list of red flags that can be used to detect earnings misrepresentation.Related paper: "Earnings Quality: Evidence from the Field" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2103384Teaching/Presentation Slides: "A Guide to Earnings Quality" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2347428

A Guide to Earnings Quality

This teaching guide is based on a comprehensive survey as well as in-depth interviews of Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). We ask the CFOs about the definition and drivers of earnings quality, with a special emphasis on the prevalence and detection of earnings misrepresentation. CFOs believe that the hallmarks of earnings quality are sustainability, absence of one-time items, and backing by actual cash flows. Earnings quality is determined in about equal measure by controllable factors like internal controls and corporate governance, and non-controllable factors like industry membership and macroeconomic conditions. On earnings misrepresentation, CFOs believe that in any given period a remarkable 20% of firms intentionally distort earnings, even though they are adhering to generally accepted accounting principles. The economic magnitude of the misrepresentation is large, averaging about 10% of reported earnings. While most misrepresentation involves earnings overstatement, interestingly, one third of the firms that are misrepresenting performance are low-balling their earnings or reversing a prior intentional overstatement. Finally, CFOs provide a list of red flags that can be used to detect earnings misrepresentation.Detailed tables and references are available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2103384.