Earnings Management, Conservatism, and Earnings Quality

Earnings Management, Conservatism, and Earnings Quality
Author: Ralf Ewert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Earnings Management, Conservatism, and Earnings Quality reviews and illustrates earnings management, conservatism, and their effects on earnings quality in an economic modeling framework. Both earnings management and conservative accounting introduce biases to financial reports. The fundamental issue addressed is what economic effects these biases have on earnings quality or financial reporting quality. Earnings Management, Conservatism, and Earnings Quality reviews analytical models of earnings management and conservatism and shows that both can have beneficial or detrimental economic effects, so a differentiated view is appropriate. Earnings management can provide additional information via the financial reporting communication channel, but it can also be used to misrepresent the firm's position. What the authors find is that similar to earnings management, conservatism can reduce the information content of financial reports if it suppresses relevant information, but it can be a desirable feature that improves economic efficiency. The approach to study earnings management, conservatism, and earnings quality is based on the information economics literature. A variety of analytical models are reviewed that capture the effects and subtle interactions of managers' incentives and rational expectations of users. The benefit of analytical models is to make precise these, often highly complex, strategic effects. They offer a rigorous explanation for the phenomena and show that sometimes conventional wisdom does not apply. The monograph is organized around a few basic model settings, which are presented in simple versions first and then in extensions to elicit the main insights most clearly. Chapter 2 presents the basic rational expectations equilibrium model with earnings management and rational inferences by the capital market. Chapter 3 is devoted to earnings quality and earnings quality metrics used in many studies. Chapter 4 studies conservatism in accounting. Finally, the authors examine the interaction between conservatism and earnings management. Each chapter ends with a section containing a summary of the main findings and conclusions.

International Perspectives on Accounting and Corporate Behavior

International Perspectives on Accounting and Corporate Behavior
Author: Kunio Ito
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 4431547924

Despite the globalization of accounting standards occurring through convergence to International Financial Reporting Standards, local accounting systems are deeply intertwined with each country’s unique institutions such as its corporate system, disclosure practices and enforcement mechanisms. First, this book empirically analyzes the effects of globalization and localization of accounting rules on corporate behavior such as earnings management, signaling, investment behavior and dividend payout policy. Second, the book unravels the economic consequences of disclosure based on the concept of self-disciplining enforcement such as management forecasts, environmental disclosures and risk disclosures by Japanese firms. This volume is a step forward in understanding the link between accounting and corporate behavior based on a new institutional accounting approach.

Earnings Management

Earnings Management
Author: Joshua Ronen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2008-08-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0387257713

This book is a study of earnings management, aimed at scholars and professionals in accounting, finance, economics, and law. The authors address research questions including: Why are earnings so important that firms feel compelled to manipulate them? What set of circumstances will induce earnings management? How will the interaction among management, boards of directors, investors, employees, suppliers, customers and regulators affect earnings management? How to design empirical research addressing earnings management? What are the limitations and strengths of current empirical models?

Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation

Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation
Author: Stephen H. Penman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 754
Release: 2010
Genre: Financial statements
ISBN: 9780071267809

Valuation is at the heart of investing. A considerable part of the information for valuation is in the financial statements.Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation, 5 e by Stephen Penman shows students how to extract information from financial statements and use that data to value firms. The 5th edition shows how to handle the accounting in financial statements and use the financial statements as a lens to view a business and assess the value it generates.

Earnings Quality

Earnings Quality
Author: Jennifer Francis
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1601981147

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.

Equity Valuation

Equity Valuation
Author: Peter O. Christensen
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1601982720

We review and critically examine the standard approach to equity valuation using a constant risk-adjusted cost of capital, and we develop a new valuation approach discounting risk-adjusted fundamentals, such as expected free cash flows and residual operating income, using nominal zero-coupon interest rates. We show that standard estimates of the cost of capital, based on historical stock returns, are likely to be a significantly biased measure of the firm's cost of capital, but also that the bias is almost impossible to quantify empirically. The new approach recognizes that, in practice, interest rates, expected equity returns, and inflation rates are all stochastic. We explicitly characterize the risk-adjustments to the fundamentals in an equilibrium setting. We show how the term structure of risk-adjustments depends on both the time-series properties of the free cash flows and the accounting policy. Growth, persistence, and mean reversion of residual operating income created by competition in the product markets or by the accounting policy are key determinants of the term structure of risk-adjustments.

Financial Statement Analysis and Earnings Forecasting

Financial Statement Analysis and Earnings Forecasting
Author: Steven J. Monahan
Publisher: Foundations and Trends (R) in Accounting
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9781680834505

Financial Statement Analysis and Earnings Forecasting is the process of analyzing historical financial statement data for the purpose of developing forecasts of future earnings. This process is important because it is central to the valuation of companies and the securities they issue. After a short introduction, Section 2 delves into the question "Why earnings"? Focusing on dividend policy irrelevance, the author describes key analytical results that imply that expected earnings are the fundamental determinant of both equity and enterprise value. Section 3 examines the issues involved in selecting the earnings metric to forecast. Once an earnings metric has been chosen, the next question to ask is "How useful are historical accounting numbers for developing forecasts of that metric?" Sections 4 through 8 focus on this question. Section 4 discusses the general role of econometric modeling. Section 5 reviews time-series models. Section 6 examines the choices a researcher makes when using panel-data approaches and the author describes the advantages of these approaches. Section 7 reviews the role of accounting measurement in determining the usefulness of historical accounting numbers for developing forecasts of future earnings. Section 8 examines approaches for forecasting the higher moments of future earnings and section 9 provides a summary.

Determinants of Earnings Forecast Error, Earnings Forecast Revision and Earnings Forecast Accuracy

Determinants of Earnings Forecast Error, Earnings Forecast Revision and Earnings Forecast Accuracy
Author: Sebastian Gell
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2012-03-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3834939374

​Earnings forecasts are ubiquitous in today’s financial markets. They are essential indicators of future firm performance and a starting point for firm valuation. Extremely inaccurate and overoptimistic forecasts during the most recent financial crisis have raised serious doubts regarding the reliability of such forecasts. This thesis therefore investigates new determinants of forecast errors and accuracy. In addition, new determinants of forecast revisions are examined. More specifically, the thesis answers the following questions: 1) How do analyst incentives lead to forecast errors? 2) How do changes in analyst incentives lead to forecast revisions?, and 3) What factors drive differences in forecast accuracy?