盈余管理行为中的经理人惯性——一种基于个人道德角度的解释与实证

Managers' Inertia Behavior in Earnings Management:An Explanation and Empirical Research Based on Personal Morality

公司治理只是外部制度影响的结果,还是同样深受个人内在品性的影响?这在实证研究上是一个较少被检验的问题,本文试图对这一问题进行探索。本文选择曾在两个上市公司担任过高管(董事长或总经理)的个人样本,通过检验两个公司之间操控性应计水平的相关性,考察盈余管理是否会受高管个人特征的影响。本文将这种个人特征阐释为道德品性,并将受其影响的盈余管理行为一致性称为盈余管理中的经理人惯性。实证研究发现,在控制了其他影响因素后,具有相同高管的公司之间盈余管理水平具有显著的正相关关系;且这种盈余管理水平的相关性并非仅仅因为高管先后任职的公司具有相似的财务状况和治理环境。实证结果支持盈余管理受到经理人惯性影响这一推论。该研究结果的启示在于,制度建设是制约盈余管理的必要但非充分条件,在外部制度建设效应边际递减之际,应重视和甄别经理人内化的德行品性,避免过于强调制度,在治理的投入上出现不符合成本效益原则、损害公司价值及利益相关者利益的情形。

Is corporate governance only influenced by external institutions? Is it also deeply influenced by managers' personal inner morality? This article tries to explore this problem in theory and empirical. We choose manager individual samples in which everyone has severed as executives(chairman or CEO) in at least two corporates, then calculate the mean of discretional accruals during his/her tenure in each corporate. We explore whether an executive personal characteristic will affect earnings management by testing the correlation of discretional accruals between two corporates with the same executive. The personal characteristic in this paper is defined as the personal morality, and its effect on the consistent earnings management behavior is called managers' inertia behavior in earnings management. The empirical results are that earnings management of corporates with the same executive are significantly positively correlated with each other after controlling other factors, such as corporate financial status and governance environment; even earnings management of corporates with the same executive but different corporate governance are significantly positively correlated with each other; this inertia in earnings management is not only because the two corporates may have the similar financial status and governance environment, but also because the two corporates have the same executive whose continuous personal morality leads to consistent earnings management behavior. We can infer from the empirical results that it does exist inertia in managers' behavior of earnings management. The revelation of these research results is that institution, such as legal system and corporate governance, is just the necessary condition of restricting earnings management, but is not the sufficient condition. The effect of institution on restricting earnings management is declined in the marginal with the input costs of institution increasing, and we should consider and pay attention to the effect of managers' inner morality so that we will not overemphasize institution, which is not coincident with cost-effective principle and will damage corporate value.