Download or read book Analyst Forecast Accruals Mispricing and Earnings Management written by 黃鼎喬 and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Do Analysts Forecasts Fully Reflect the Information in Accruals written by Anwer S. Ahmed and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study investigates whether financial analysts correctly weight cash flows, accruals and components of accruals in forecasting future earnings. This examination is in the spirit of Sloan (1996) who documents evidence that investors do not correctly distinguish between the cash flow and accrual components of earnings. We find that analysts do distinguish between accruals and cash flows although they generally underweight the information in both accruals and cash flows. More importantly, we find that analysts do not distinguish between discretionary and non-discretionary accruals even though discretionary accruals are less persistent than non-discretionary accruals. Our findings complement and extend the findings in recent studies on analyst forecast inefficiency with respect to the information in accrual and cash flow components of earnings using alternative research designs [Teoh and Wong (1998), Bradshaw, Richardson and Sloan (2000), Barth and Hutton (2000)]. Analysts are considered to play an important role as information intermediaries in educating investors about the future prospects of firms. They are trained in analyzing financial data and have industry expertise as well as detailed firm-specific knowledge through contacts with managers. Thus, one would expect analysts to correctly incorporate the information in earnings components specifically discretionary versus non-discretionary accruals. Our evidence complements evidence in recent studies that raises questions about the ability of analysts, on-average, to correctly incorporate the information in accruals and cash flows in forecasting future earnings. This in turn implies that other outsiders are also likely to find it difficult to undo earnings management via discretionary accruals and therefore provides a rationale for the existence of earnings management.

Download or read book The Association Between Management Earnings Forecast Errors and Accruals written by Guojin Gong and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers' assessments of their firms' business prospects are imperfect. Since managers' imperfect business assessments influence both accruals generation and earnings projection, we hypothesize that management earnings forecasts exhibit greater optimism (pessimism) when accruals are relatively high (low). Consistent with this hypothesis, we find a positive association between management earnings forecast errors and accruals. This positive association is stronger for firms operating in a more uncertain business environment and for firms in industries exhibiting greater covariation between accruals and growth-related activities. Moreover, this positive association is significant when accruals likely reflect managers' true beliefs about firms' business prospects, but is nonexistent when accruals are likely manipulated to boost managers' trading gains. Supplementary analysis reveals that the presence of management earnings forecasts does not significantly reduce accrual mispricing.

Download or read book Understanding Analysts Reactions to Earnings Management written by Yuyan Guan and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines the determinants of analysts' reactions to firms' earnings management. I present a model showing that analysts revise their forecasts according to their forecast errors revealed by earnings announcements and reporting biases embedded in reported earnings. The model further demonstrates that the relationship between forecast revisions and reporting biases can be affected by analysts' forecasting ability, the inherent uncertainty of whether reporting biases have occurred, as well as analysts' incentives. To empirically test the model's prediction regarding analysts' forecasting ability, I use analysts' firm-specific experience, size of their brokerage firm, and the number of industries they follow as proxies. Consistent with the model's prediction, I provide evidence showing that well-experienced analysts adjust more for earnings management while analysts following a greater number of industries adjust less for earnings management. Sensitivity analysis using analyst's historical firm-specific forecast accuracy as an alternative measure of forecasting ability further supports the hypothesis that analysts with better forecasting ability adjust more for earnings management. Moreover, analysts adjust less for earnings management when the inherent uncertainty of the reporting bias is greater. Specifically, analysts adjust less for earnings management when: (1) the past volatility of discretionary accruals is high; and (2) the firm has a marked propensity to smooth earnings. There is little evidence that affiliated analysts adjust less for earnings management than unaffiliated analysts. However, analysts adjust more for earnings management in the post-Reg FD period than in the pre-Reg FD period, which is consistent with Regulation FD achieving its objective of strengthening analysts' incentives to issue unbiased forecasts.

Download or read book Analysts Response to Earnings Management written by Xiaohui Liu and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previous literature studies analysts' earnings forecasts without considering firms' response to analysts' forecasts. This study improves upon previous research by considering firms' earnings management with respect to analysts' forecasts. I hypothesize that analysts understand these earnings management practices, and incorporate firms' expected behavior into their forecasts. I demonstrate that for firms with high tendencies and flexibilities to manage earnings downwards, and/or firms with negatively skewed earnings, analysts account for earnings management practices by lowering the otherwise optimal forecasts. Comparing analysts' consensus forecasts with proxy for non-strategic forecasts (otherwise optimal forecasts), I find that analysts' forecasts are systematically below the non-strategic forecasts for firm-quarters that have: high accounting reserves available to manage earnings downwards, high unmanaged earnings, low debt to equity ratios, negative forecasted earnings, and negatively skewed unmanaged earnings. These results suggest that analysts forecast below the non-strategic level in order to avoid the large optimistic forecast errors that occur when firms who cannot meet forecasts manage earnings downward. The test results also suggest that analysts forecast above the non-strategic forecasts when earnings are positively skewed, and/or when firms have high tendencies and flexibilities to manage earnings upwards.

Download or read book Analysts Use of Accruals and Cash Flows in Forecasting Earnings written by Ramesh Narayana Chari and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research investigates whether financial analysts fully incorporate the information contained in accrual and cash flow components of current earnings when forecasting future earnings. I present evidence that analysts fail to fully incorporate the implications of these components for earnings persistence in their forecasts. Analysts' appear to ignore information in past earnings to a greater extent when the magnitude of accruals in prior year earnings is large relative to cash flows. I find that information in these components can be used to improve analysts' forecasts. This improvement is most evident for firms which have a high incidence of accruals in prior year earnings. I demonstrate the economic significance of improving analysts' forecasts by implementing a trading strategy that predicts stock price changes. This trading strategy yields significantly positive risk-adjusted abnormal returns. These results suggest that analysts' forecasting inefficiency (see Mendenhall, 1991) is potentially rooted in their misperceptions about the implications of accruals and cash flows for earnings persistence. These findings are useful to accounting standard-setters and to capital markets research that uses analysts' forecasts to proxy for earnings expectations.

Download or read book Analyst Earnings Forecast Revisions and the Pricing of Accruals written by Mary E. Barth and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pricing of Accounting Accruals Information and Revisions of Analyst Earnings Forecasts written by Keiichi Kubota and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates how accurately the information contained in accounting accruals and their components are impounded into stock prices and provide evidence on the accounting accruals and the revisions of analyst earnings forecasts in terms of pricing or mispricing the stock. The results from the regression analyses with pooled data and the ones from the cross-sectional Fama and MacBeth tests unanimously suggest that the accounting accruals and their components, in particular, the abnormal accruals, have significant explanatory power in explaining the future stock returns, even after adjusting for the systematic risk of the stocks. Second, we conduct hedging portfolio tests and find that the accruals information helps investors earn abnormal returns. Finally, we investigate the relationship between the abnormal accruals and the revisions of analyst earnings forecasts. We find that the larger the abnormal accruals of the firms, the higher the subsequent downward revisions of analyst forecasts. The evidence indicates that the analysts fail to incorporate the full implications of accruals information in forming their forecasts, even though such an overestimation or underestimation eventually is corrected as the next year's earnings related information becomes publicly available.

Download or read book Exploring Managers Accrual Related Forecast Bias written by Sami Keskek and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, we examine the effect of accrual-based earnings management on the association between managers' earnings forecast errors and accruals, which we label “managers' accrual-related forecast bias.” We build on extensive research which finds that managers engage in accrual-based earnings management to meet or beat earnings benchmarks and report smooth earnings series. We hypothesize that managers bias their subsequent-year forecasts in the direction of accruals management to increase market confidence in the managed earnings numbers. Consistent with our expectations, we find a positive association between managers' earnings forecast errors and discretionary accruals, but no association between managers' earnings forecast errors and nondiscretionary accruals. Furthermore, the association between managers' earnings forecast errors and discretionary accruals is stronger when managers have limited ability to continue managing subsequent-year accruals to support the bias in their forecasts. We also find a substantial decline in managers' accrual-related forecast bias following the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), which restricted managers' use of accrual-based earnings management. More importantly, we find that the effect of forecasting difficulty on managers' accrual-related forecast bias occurs only in the pre-SOX period. Overall, our results suggest that, contrary to claims in prior research, managers' accrual-related forecast bias is not simply a product of forecasting difficulty related to accruals. Rather, at least in some cases, it appears to be intentional.

Download or read book Industry specific Discretionary Accruals and Earnings Management written by Atif Ikram and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 3 extends the decomposition to examine the role of firm-specific and industry-specific discretionary accruals in explaining the subsequent market underperformance and negative analysts' forecast errors documented for firms issuing equity. I examine the post-issue market returns and analysts' forecast errors for a sample of seasoned equity issues between 1975 and 2004 and find that offering-year firm-specific discretionary accruals can partially explain these anomalous capital market outcomes. Nonetheless, I find this predictive power of firm-specific accruals to be more pronounced for issues that occur during 1975 - 1989 compared to issues taking place between 1990 and 2004. Additionally, I find no evidence that investors and analysts are more overoptimistic about the prospects of issuers that have both high firm-specific and industry-specific discretionary accruals (compared to firms with high discretionary accruals in general). The results indicate no role for industry-specific discretionary accruals in explaining overoptimistic expectations from seasoned equity issues and suggest the importance of firm-specific factors in inducing earnings manipulation surrounding equity issues.

Download or read book Management Bias Across Multiple Accounting Estimates written by Timothy A. Seidel and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We examine whether managers appear to aggregate bias in multiple subjective accrual estimates to meet or just beat analyst expectations. We also consider whether the updated language in recent PCAOB auditing standards, focusing auditors on the potential for bias across multiple estimates, impacted this method of managing earnings. Using hand-collected data from a sample of manufacturing firms, we find that meeting or just beating the most recent consensus analyst earnings forecast is positively associated with income-increasing bias aggregated from multiple accounting estimates. We also find that this relation attenuates in the years following the issuance of PCAOB auditing standards focusing auditors on this issue. Further analyses reveal that after these standards were released, firms increased the use of income-increasing, unexpected non-GAAP exclusions to meet or just beat expectations, an alternative technique subject to less auditor scrutiny. Additionally, firms using bias from multiple accounting estimates after the updated guidance in these PCAOB standards do so using bias spread in smaller amounts across more individual estimates. These findings provide important insight into how managers use accruals to meet or just beat an important benchmark as well as the impact of PCAOB auditing standard updates on this earnings management practice.

Download or read book Accruals Quality and Analyst Coverage written by Minsup Song and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We examine the relation between analyst coverage and accruals quality. Because accrual accounting requires managers to estimate the future economic consequences of current events, accruals reflect estimation errors and potential managerial opportunism. This may lower accruals quality and provide noisier signals of firm value. If investors turn to analysts for supplemental information, then demand for analyst services will increase as accruals quality decreases. Because lower accruals quality increases the value of their services, analysts have greater incentives to cover firms with low accruals quality. Our results support these hypotheses. Although firms with low accruals quality have greater analyst coverage and forecast revisions, we also find they have larger forecast errors and dispersion. Thus, analysts are unable to fully resolve the uncertainty in accruals. This is consistent with accruals reflecting information risk.

Download or read book The Consistency of Mandatory and Voluntary Management Earnings Forecasts and Implications for Analyst and Investor Information Processing written by Richard A. Cazier and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study we examine whether managers' voluntary forecasts of future earnings are consistent with the implicit forecasts of future earnings that underlie a specific mandatory accrual, the valuation allowance. This accrual relies heavily on managerial estimation and is also based, in part, on managers' private, forward-looking information. Thus, it provides an ideal setting to investigate the interplay between voluntary and mandatory financial disclosures. By examining the consistency between the voluntary and mandatory forecasts, we are also able to provide insight into whether the predictable accrual-related bias in voluntary earnings forecasts carries over into the mandatory forecast embedded in the valuation allowance. We then investigate whether the biased voluntary earnings guidance helps analysts and investors more accurately interpret the information in valuation allowance changes about future earnings expectations. To increase the power of our tests we utilize a sample of loss firms, which frequently record valuation allowances to fully or partially offset deferred tax assets.We first document that more than 62 percent of our sample of loss firms report valuation allowance changes and management earnings guidance that convey the same basic information about future earnings (i.e., either both forecast profit or both forecast loss). Thus, these voluntary and mandatory forecasts are largely consistent with each other. We then provide evidence that managers provide overly pessimistic forecasts for observations whose valuation allowance changes signal bad news about future earnings, but overly optimistic forecasts for observations whose valuation allowance changes signal strong good news about future earnings. Finally, our results suggest that managers' biased earnings forecasts actually help analysts and investors more accurately interpret the information about future earnings in valuation allowance changes. Our findings provide new insights into actions managers can take to improve investor and analyst processing of financial statement-based tax information.

Download or read book Discretionary Accruals and Earnings Management written by Benjamin C. Ayers and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analysts-based unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as quot;pseudoquot; targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and beating the profit benchmark extends to pseudo targets throughout the earnings distribution. We find similar results for the earnings change distribution. In contrast, we find few positive associations between discretionary accruals and beating pseudo targets derived from analysts-based unexpected earnings. We develop an additional analysis that accounts for the systematic association between discretionary accruals and earnings and earnings changes. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and earnings intensifies around the actual profit benchmark (i.e., where earnings management incentives may be more pronounced). We find similar effects around the actual earnings increase benchmark. However, analogous patterns exist for cash flows around the profit and earnings increase benchmarks. In sum, we are unable to eliminate other plausible explanations for the associations between discretionary accruals and beating the profit and earnings increase benchmarks.

Download or read book Management Forecasts and Discretionary Accruals written by Alastair Murdoch and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Positive accounting theory suggests a number of reasons why management might decide to manage earnings. This paper examines the extent to which such a decision may be a result of management having previously issued a forecast of earnings. Based on a sample of 117 firms, each of which issued one management forecast of earnings during the period 1986 to 1992, we find that discretionary accruals are adjusted to bring reported earnings more in line with management s forecast. We find that the accruals are larger (in absolute value) when the forecast was too low than when it was too high, and when the forecast was later in the fiscal year than when it was earlier. We conclude that, although management has incentives to avoid appearing to have made an inaccurate forecast, it is constrained in its use of discretionary accruals, particularly those which are income increasing, presumably by the materiality and conservatism of generally accepted accounting principles as enforced by professional ethics and the external auditors.

Download or read book Extreme Accruals Earnings Quality and Investor Mispricing written by Anwer S. Ahmed and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extreme accruals are commonly viewed as tainted by earnings management, contributing to lower quality earnings. We refer to this presumption as the earnings management/quality hypothesis. We directly examine three aspects of the presumed relation between the level of accruals and earnings management/quality: (i) the implications of earnings management for earnings persistence, (ii) the implications of earnings management for accrual mispricing, and (iii) the likelihood of greater opportunistic management to achieve earnings targets.We find (i) no evidence that extreme income-increasing accruals have lower persistence for year-ahead earnings, (ii) no evidence that investors systematically overweight extreme accruals, and (iii) no evidence that extreme accrual firms fall into the interval of firms just avoiding losses or earnings decreases more than other firms. We do find evidence that extreme income-decreasing accruals have lower persistence, but the evidence suggests this results from poor economic performance rather than accrual manipulation. We also document that investors consistently underestimate the persistence of cash flows for all firms, and that predictable year-ahead abnormal returns to extreme total or abnormal accrual portfolios documented in prior work appear to be driven by cash flow mispricing rather than accrual mispricing. Overall, our findings cast doubt on using extreme accruals to proxy for earnings management and/or low earnings quality.

Download or read book Financial Analysts and the Pricing of Accruals written by Mary E. Barth and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We test predictions relating to the role of financial analysts in aiding investors' assessment of the different valuation implications of the cash flow and accrual components of earnings. First, we examine whether analysts revise their forecasts of future earnings in anticipation of predictable accrual reversals. Then, we examine whether share prices reflect predictable accrual reversals differently depending on analyst activity. Our findings suggest that analysts act as sophisticated information intermediaries in that some analysts are able to identify firms with less persistent accruals. However, share prices do not reflect the information conveyed by analyst forecast revisions. Rather, investors appear to expect the same persistence in earnings, regardless of its cash flow and accrual components and regardless of analyst activity, until the accruals reverse. Thus, incorporating information from analyst activity substantially improves short-term returns to an accrual-based trading strategy.