Earnings Management Around Seasoned Equity Offerings

Earnings Management Around Seasoned Equity Offerings
Author: Lakshmanan Shivakumar
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2002
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper examines earnings management around seasoned equity offerings. Consistent with managers managing earnings, I find offering firms to have temporarily high earnings around the offering. The temporary increase in earnings around the offering appears to be primarily driven by abnormally high accruals in the period. By relating my estimates of abnormal accruals to the incentives and abilities of managers to manage earnings, I show that these abnormal accruals result from earnings management. Further, this analysis shows that the ability to manage earnings is constraining mainly for managers with high incentives to manage earnings. Also, I argue that the announcement of an equity offering signals earnings management in prior quarters to the market, which would result in a negative price reaction to the announcement. Consistent with this argument, I show that the earnings management before an offering announcement partly explains the negative market reaction to the announcement.

Causes or Consequences? Earnings Management Around Seasoned Equity Offerings

Causes or Consequences? Earnings Management Around Seasoned Equity Offerings
Author: Jie Chen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

Prior studies find that earnings management around seasoned equity offerings is negatively related to subsequent stock performance and attribute the finding to the issuing firms' use of inflated earnings to boost stock prices. We show in this paper that earnings management is not significantly related to concurrent abnormal returns. Rather, it is significantly positively related to prior abnormal returns. This suggests that, rather than a cause of stock price run-up, earnings management is likely a consequence of the stock overvaluation prior to the offerings, supporting the agency theory of overvalued equity (Jensen, 2005). We also show that when examining the relation between earnings management and subsequent stock performance, one has to be careful with the appropriate window for measuring earnings management.

Earnings Management and the Post-Issue Underperformance of Seasoned Equity Offerings

Earnings Management and the Post-Issue Underperformance of Seasoned Equity Offerings
Author: Siew Hong Teoh
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2000
Genre:
ISBN:

Loughran and Ritter (1995) document that firms issuing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) severely underperform the stock market for three to five years after the offering. Our paper examines the hypothesis that SEO investors are too optimistic because they naively extrapolate earnings trends without fully adjusting for observable discretionary managerial reporting choices. We find that aggressive firms, which report high pre-SEO earnings at the expense of post-SEO earnings by taking high discretionary pre-issue accruals, subsequently performed worse (abnormal stock returns and industry-adjusted net income). Aggressive quartile firms earned a highly significant-48% four-year cumulative abnormal return; conservative quartile firms earned an insignificant-7% four-year cumulative abnormal return. In contrast with discretionary accruals, pre-issue non-discretionary accruals did not predict post SEO returns. This paper is also available at the following web address: ftp://next.agsm.ucla.edu/academic.finance/mngseo.ps ftp://next.agsm.ucla.edu/academic.finance/mngseo.hp If you have any questions concerning downloading, please contact Professor Teoh.

Do Firms Mislead Investors by Overstating Earnings Around Seasoned Equity Offerings?

Do Firms Mislead Investors by Overstating Earnings Around Seasoned Equity Offerings?
Author: Lakshmanan Shivakumar
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2003
Genre:
ISBN:

The paper examines whether firms overstate earnings before seasoned equity offerings and whether, at offering announcements, investors recognize and undo the effects of such earnings management. Consistent with Rangan (1998) and Teoh et al. (1998), I find evidence of earnings management around the offerings. However, in contrast to Rangan and Teoh et al.'s conclusions on investors naivete, I show that investors undo this earnings management at equity offerings announcements. The investor naivete conclusion of Teoh et al. (1998) and Rangan (1998) appears to be due to test misspecification. Overall, the results in the paper seems to suggest, at first glance, that earnings management by issuers is wasteful. However, using a rational expectations framework, this paper shows that earnings management by issuers, rather than being intended to mislead investors, may actually be the rational response of issuers to anticipated market behavior at offering announcements.

Earnings Management and the Post-Issue Underperformance in Seasoned Equity Offerings

Earnings Management and the Post-Issue Underperformance in Seasoned Equity Offerings
Author: Siew Hong Teoh
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1998
Genre:
ISBN:

Loughran and Ritter (1995) document that firms issuing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) severely underperform the stock market for three to five years after the offering. Our paper examines the hypothesis that SEO investors are too optimistic because they naively extrapolate earnings trends without fully adjusting for observable discretionary managerial reporting choices. We find that aggressive firms, which report high pre-SEO earnings at the expense of post-SEO earnings by taking high discretionary pre-issue accruals, subsequently perform worse (abnormal stock returns and industry-adjusted net income). Aggressive quartile firms earned a highly significant-50% four-year cumulative abnormal return; conservative quartile firms earn an insignificant-7% four-year cumulative abnormal return. In contrast with discretionary accruals, pre-issue non-discretionary accruals did not predict post-SEO returns.

Are Analysts Over-Optimistic Around Seasoned Equity Offerings

Are Analysts Over-Optimistic Around Seasoned Equity Offerings
Author: Robert S. Hansen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

We examine analysts' earnings forecast behavior around SEOs. We document that equity issuers are among the high growth IBES firms that typically have much higher forecast errors. Adjusting for this bias we find that earnings per share forecasts around equity offerings are not more favorable than forecasts for other high growth firms. Further, analysts forecasts of issuers' long run growth prospects around the SEOs are not more favorable than those of other high growth firms. This suggests that abnormal forecasts observed around equity issuance, for either short run or long run forecasts, is not unique but is instead a phenomenon that is common to high growth firms. They are not consistent with the hypothesis that equity offerings coincide with a period of overly favorable earnings expectations. We also find that firm management increases in discretionary reported earnings around SEOs, which are viewed as a proxy for earnings manipulation, do not have a significant effect on earnings forecasts. These results are consistent with analysts and their investment banks behaving credibly around SEOs. The results do not agree with the notions that management has foresight of investors' irrationally optimistic earnings expectations when their firm issues equity, and that they can influence those expectations through inflating non-cash components of reported earnings.