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Book Earnings Management  Conservatism  and Earnings Quality

Download or read book Earnings Management Conservatism and Earnings Quality written by Ralf Ewert and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Evidence on the Relation between Audit and Earnings Quality  Do Clients of Higher Quality Auditors Provide Better Financial Reporting

Download or read book Evidence on the Relation between Audit and Earnings Quality Do Clients of Higher Quality Auditors Provide Better Financial Reporting written by and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: This paper studies the relation between audit and earnings quality. It examines whether firms audited by a Big 4 member engage in higher earnings management activities as proxied by the magnitude of discretionary and absolute accruals, as well as an income smoothing measure. The author predicts that large auditors have higher competencies and incentives to deliver a higher quality audit. Therefore, their clients are expected to reveal less sophisticated earnings management and thus higher earnings quality. The results do not support this relation. Since standardsetters have been concerned about managers’ use of discretion to manage earnings in their financial reports, an increasing amount of empirical research was conducted to address this issue, additionally to regulation. While independent auditors (aim to) assure that these statements are in accordance with legal compliance, the actual audit quality can be grasped as the contingency that the auditor exposes and discloses an anomaly in their clients’ financial reports. Whereas numerous audit scandals threaten the trustworthiness of well-known large auditors, there is various research revealing that Big N audited firms are supposed to disclose financial reports of higher quality. Supplementing misguiding accrual accounting practices in this regard, this study also addresses another proxy for earnings management: income smoothing. Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) explain corporate income smoothing with the fact that managers avoid revealing earning decreases and losses to diminish costs arising from transactions with stakeholders. Similarly, Degeorge, Patel and Zeckhauser (1999) show that managers smooth earnings to meet analysts’ forecasts. On the other hand there are various contrary studies. DeFond and Jimbalvo (1993) found that auditor-client disagreements resulting from earnings management, are more present in Big 4 audited firms. They explain this with the properties of the “common” Big 4 clients. For the reason of the ambiguous results, it is interesting to study the effects and compare them with prior evidence to answer the question whether Big 4 auditors deliver “higher” quality in terms of a “better” financial reporting. The terms are operationalized using a dis-cretionary accruals and income smoothing measure and analyzed for (non-)Big 4 audited UK-firms in the period 2005-2011.

Book Accounting Conservatism Or Earnings Management

Download or read book Accounting Conservatism Or Earnings Management written by Timothy Bryan and published by Dissertation Discovery Company. This book was released on 2019-08-07 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This paper empirically examines the relationship between conservatism and earnings management in chemical and allied products manufacturers via an analysis of the allowance for doubtful accounts and bad debt expense. Results indicate that the allowance for doubtful accounts is overstated and has become more overstated since 2004. In addition, results show that firms utilized the excessive conservatism to manage earnings to achieve earnings goals throughout the study period. An important overall inference from these results is that the traditional view of the allowance for doubtful accounts as unconditional conservatism is, in fact, conditional conservatism. Dissertation Discovery Company and Jacksonville University are dedicated to making scholarly works more discoverable and accessible throughout the world. This dissertation, "Accounting Conservatism or Earnings Management" by Timothy Gordon Bryan, was obtained from Jacksonville University and is being sold with permission from the author. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation.

Book An Examination of the Association Between Earnings Management and Type of Accounting Standards

Download or read book An Examination of the Association Between Earnings Management and Type of Accounting Standards written by Yu Chen and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the effects of types of accounting standards on earnings management from a global perspective. I examine the ability or inability of principles-based as well as rules-based accounting standards in curbing accruals earnings management and real activities earnings management. I also examine the roles played by internal corporate governance, audit quality and external corporate governance in this potential relationship between types of accounting standards and earnings management. The results show that under the condition of weak (strong) internal corporate governance, companies that use principles-based standards tend to engage in more (less) accruals earnings management compared with companies that use rules-based standards. Due to the substitution effect, companies that use principles-based standards tend to engage in less real activities earnings management compared with companies that use rules-based standards under the weak internal corporate governance condition. Similarly, high audit quality tends to curb both accruals earnings management and real activities earnings management no matter what types of accounting standards companies use. However, regardless of audit quality, companies that use rules-based standards engage less in accruals earnings management compared with those use principles-based standards. Furthermore, regardless of audit quality, companies that use rules-based standards engage more in real activities earnings management compared with those that use principles-based standards. These findings have important implications for investors, regulators and educators.

Book Is There an Association Between Earnings Management and Auditor Provided Tax Services

Download or read book Is There an Association Between Earnings Management and Auditor Provided Tax Services written by Gopal V. Krishnan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The issue of whether auditor-provided nonaudit services enhance or exacerbate financial reporting quality has been intensely debated among the regulators, auditors, investors, academic researchers, and the media. In 2006, the SEC approved the rules proposed by the PCAOB limiting the tax services that incumbent auditors can offer to their clients. We contribute to this debate by examining whether auditor-provided tax services mitigate earnings management. We find a negative and significant relation between earnings management (loss avoidance) and tax fee paid to the incumbent auditor. Our results are consistent with knowledge spillover, i.e., when the same audit firm provides both audit and tax services insight learned from providing tax services can contribute to audit quality.

Book Essays Examining the Association Between Going Concern Audit Opinions  Subsequent Earnings Management and Engagement Office Audit and Reporting Quality

Download or read book Essays Examining the Association Between Going Concern Audit Opinions Subsequent Earnings Management and Engagement Office Audit and Reporting Quality written by Marcus R. Brooks and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two essays that examine the association between going concern audit opinions, subsequent earnings management and engagement office audit and reporting quality. Essay I (Chapter 1) examines the earnings management behavior of financially distressed firms following the receipt of a going concern opinion. The results indicate that financially distressed firms, unable to improve their financial condition through the manipulation of accounting accruals, report large magnitudes of negative discretionary and working capital accruals. As a result, these firms turn their attention to the manipulation of real operational activities. By engaging in various forms of real activity manipulation, financially distressed firms are able to reduce reported expenses, conserve cash, and most importantly, avoid bankruptcy and/or the receipt of a subsequent going concern opinion, despite being in financial distress. Essay II (Chapter 2) investigates whether audit quality and reporting accuracy is associated with engagement office propensity to issue going concern opinions. The findings from this study show clients of engagement offices with a high propensity to issue going concern audit opinions are associated with large magnitudes of income decreasing discretionary accruals, suggesting that these engagement offices require their clients to report more conservatively. The findings also show that these engagement offices' financial statement conservatism carries over to their financial reporting decision-making. The conservative reporting posture of these engagement offices leads them to issue going concern audit opinions to subsequently viable clients, leading to higher type I error rates. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the accounting literature addressing going concern audit reporting by creating two new variables that help to explain the association between the receipt of a prior going concern audit opinion and subsequent earnings management, and the association between engagement office propensity to issue going concern audit opinions and audit and reporting quality. The variables created could open a new stream of literature aimed at addressing earnings management behavior and choices following the receipt of a going concern opinion and also demonstrate that more attention should be directed to the characteristics of individual engagement offices because they are the ultimate determining factor of an audit firm's overall audit and reporting quality. Together, the studies show how important it is to analyze the effects of going concern audit reports and how they are associated with seemingly unrelated topics in accounting literature.

Book Management Through Accounts

Download or read book Management Through Accounts written by James Harris Bliss and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Essays on the Quality of Audited Financial Statements

Download or read book Essays on the Quality of Audited Financial Statements written by Ulf Mohrmann and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation consists of four essays on the quality of audited financial statements. The first analysis investigates the association between several regulations of the audit market and earnings characteristics. The second essay differentiates between different drivers of audit quality after an auditor change by comparing the effects of voluntary and mandatory auditor changes. The third study analyses the different strategies of Big4 and non-Big4 auditors in dealing with Level 3 fair values. The fourth part examines banks' valuation behavior concerning Level 3 fair values.

Book The Effect of Audit Quality on Earnings Management

Download or read book The Effect of Audit Quality on Earnings Management written by Connie L. Becker and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the relation between audit quality and earnings management. Consistent with prior research, we treat audit quality as a dichotomous variable and assume that Big Six auditors are of higher quality than non-Big Six auditors. Earnings management is captured by discretionary accruals that are estimated using a cross-sectional version of the Jones (1991) model. Prior literature suggests that auditors are more likely to object to management's accounting choices that increase earnings (as opposed to decrease earnings) and that auditors are more likely to be sued when they are associated with financial statements that overstate earnings (as compared to understate earnings). Therefore, we hypothesize that clients of non-Big Six auditors report discretionary accruals that increase income relatively more than the discretionary accruals reported by clients of Big Six auditors. This hypothesis is supported by evidence from a sample of 10, 379 Big Six and 2, 179 non-Big Six firm-years. Specifically, clients of non-Big Six auditors report discretionary accruals that are, on average, 1.5 to 2.1 percent of total assets higher than the discretionary accruals reported by clients of Big Six auditors. Also, consistent with earnings management, we find that the mean and median of the absolute value of discretionary accruals are greater for firms with non-Big Six auditors. This also indicates that lower audit quality is associated with more quot;accounting flexibility.quot.

Book Audit Quality and Earnings Management in France

Download or read book Audit Quality and Earnings Management in France written by Charles Piot and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the effect of audit quality variables on abnormal accruals in the French context. The sample comprises 255 firm-years observations from SBF 120 Index companies (1999-2001). Abnormal accruals are estimated using a Jones cross-sectional Model, as well as a CFO Model (Jones Model controlling for cash flows). They are considered in signed value, as a proxy for accounting conservatism, and in absolute value, as a proxy for the overall earnings management regardless of income-increasing or -decreasing incentives. Multivariate analyses document that: (1) the presence of a Big Five auditor has no effect on the magnitude of abnormal accruals whether considered in signed or absolute value; (2) the presence of an audit committee (but not the committee's independence) is associated with lower signed abnormal accruals, suggesting more conservative accounting earnings; and (3) in contradiction with positive accounting predictions, leverage has a negative effect on signed abnormal accruals. Implications of these findings are discussed in the French setting with respect to, notably, the lower litigation risk of auditors (vs. the US litigation system), the recommendations on audit committees, the duties of corporate directors, and the traditionally significant role of accounting in the protection of debtholders' interests.

Book Earnings Management

Download or read book Earnings Management written by Joshua Ronen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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?

Book Auditor Tenure and Accounting Conservatism

Download or read book Auditor Tenure and Accounting Conservatism written by Dan Li and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounting regulators are concerned about the potential threat of long-term auditor-client relationships on auditor independence, leading to lower audit quality. The main objective of this study is to examine the association between auditor tenure and an important feature of accounting, namely conservatism. Following Basu (1997) and Ball, Kothari and Robin (2000), I define conservatism as the quicker recognition in earnings of bad news about expected future cash flows. I investigate whether long-term auditor-client relationships are associated with less timely recognition of earnings to bad news, and a lower rate of reversal of negative earnings changes. The overall results strongly show that conservatism decreases as auditor tenure lengthens. The results are robust across various measures of conservatism and a series of sensitivity tests. However, auditors' litigation exposure appears to be able to mitigate the adverse impact of auditor tenure. In additional tests, I find that the reduced conservatism is not driven by the larger clients that auditors have incentives to retain. Moreover, I find that even industry specialists could not avoid the negative impact of longer auditor-client relationships on conservatism. The study provides some support to the regulators who are concerned about the potential negative impact of auditor tenure on audit quality and the rule of mandatory audit firm rotation.

Book Audit Partner Rotation  Earnings Quality and Earnings Conservatism

Download or read book Audit Partner Rotation Earnings Quality and Earnings Conservatism written by Jane Hamilton and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We provide evidence of an association between audit partner rotation and the quality of earnings. It is a requirement for Australian firms that the engagement partner be identified by name in the annual report. Using a sample of 3,621 firm-years between 1998 and 2003, we show that audit partner changes most likely reflecting partner rotation (i.e., they are not due to a switch of audit firm) are associated with lower signed unexpected accruals, and that for Big 5 clients this relation is driven by smaller positive unexpected accruals following partner changes. This result is consistent with more conservative reporting following a rotation of audit partner, and this interpretation is further supported by evidence suggesting a significant increase in the asymmetrically timely recognition of economic losses when firms have a change of audit partner. Our tests also show that these effects occur predominantly among clients of Big 5 audit firms, and that any effect is concentrated in the latter part of our sample period, when partner rotation was a professional requirement. We therefore conclude that audit partner rotation is associated with incrementally greater conservatism in financial reporting, but only in circumstances where the ability of client firms to resist partner rotation is reduced by mandatory partner rotation requirements.

Book Meet Beat Market Expectation  Accounting Conservatism and Corporate Governance

Download or read book Meet Beat Market Expectation Accounting Conservatism and Corporate Governance written by Bikki Jaggi and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accounting conservatism has been recognized as a reporting strategy that benefits shareholders and financial statement users. We hypothesize that managers in general are likely to sacrifice the benefit associated with accounting conservatism when adopting meeting/beating market expectations (hereafter MBME). Our findings show a negative association between MBME, proxied by analysts' consensus forecasts, and accounting conservatism, defined in terms of conditional conservatism (Basu, 1997; Ball and Shivakumar, 2005, 2006) and we show that such relationship is not a mechanical connection between reporting strategy and managerial incentives to report higher earnings. Further analysis show that the negative relationship still exists after controlling for expectation as well as accrual-based and real earnings management. However, we document that G-index (Gompers et al., 2003), reflecting corporate governance in terms of anti-takeover provisions, has a significant impact on the negative association between accounting conservatism and MBME. Such finding shows that firms with less anti-takeover provisions, proxied by G-index, are less likely to sacrifice the benefit associated with conservative accounting for MBME.

Book Earnings Quality

Download or read book Earnings Quality written by Jennifer Francis and published by Now Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2008 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Relationship Between Governance Practices  Audit Quality and Earnings Management

Download or read book The Relationship Between Governance Practices Audit Quality and Earnings Management written by Rohaida Basiruddin and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines two empirical studies. Firstly, it examines the relationship between corporate governance characteristics (relating to the size, composition of independent members, financial expertise and meeting frequency of boards of directors and audit committee) and audit quality. Secondly, the study investigates the effectiveness of corporate governance characteristics and higher quality auditors in constraining earnings management. There are three proxies of audit quality employed: audit fees, non-audit fees and industry specialist auditors. Based on data obtained from the FTSE 350 between 2005 and 2008, the first empirical findings suggest that independent non-executive directors on board demand an additional and extensive audit effort from the auditor in order to certify their monitoring function, resulting in an increase in the audit fees and the perceived audit quality. The results also indicate a positive relationship between independent board and non-audit fees, suggesting that independent board support the view that the joint provision of audit and non-audit services does not necessarily compromise auditor independence, but rather that it broadens the auditors? knowledge and improves audit judgement. The findings from the second empirical study suggest that higher quality auditors (which either charge higher audit fees or are industry specialist auditors) are likely to reduce earnings manipulation. However, no evidence suggests that NAS fees affect earnings management. In addition, the current study finds inconsistent results linking the corporate governance characteristics and opportunistic earnings. Overall, both findings are consistent with agency theory, which states that independent board and higher quality auditors are associated with effective monitoring, which in turn helps to improve the quality of financial reporting. The findings are of potential interest to policy makers, professionals and boards of directors, especially on issues relating to audit quality and the mandating of corporate governance practices.