中国上市公司盈余管理弹性的实证研究

Empirical Study on the Earnings Management Flexibility of Chinese Listed Company

本文提出了一种衡量盈余管理弹性的新方法,同时检验了它对公司财务披露决策的影响。以往许多文献都假设盈余管理是无偿的,于是管理者能无限度的进行利润操纵。但是,在现实中由于存在着GAAP(会计准则)、审计师和证监会等诸多因素的限制,如果管理者依然超出可控应计部分来进行盈余管理,那么代价将是沉重的。所以本文认为,前期操纵性应计部分和它们的回复比率会共同决定当期的盈余管理弹性。基于这些分析,笔者构建了反映盈余管理弹性的经营周期弹性,并且从实证的角度加以验证该变量的有效性。实证结果表明:经营周期弹性和Barton&Simko(2002)的弹性指标都能有效地反映盈余管理弹性,因此都支持了具有较低弹性的公司难以实现盈余预测目标的说法;而Kasznik(1999)的弹性指标则存在失效的情形。

This paper suggests a new measure of earnings management flexibility and examine its effect on financial reporting strategies. Numerous prior literatures assume that earnings management is free and managers can manipulate earnings without restriction. However, due to the constraint from GAAP,auditors and SEC, earnings management beyond allowable accrual is costly. So this paper supports prior discretionary accruals and reversal rate of these accruals together determine the current earnings management flexibility. Relaying on this analysis, I construct a flexibility measure, which is called operating cycle flexibility to allow me to check the impact of flexibility empirically. The results show that both operating cycle flexibility and flexibility measure proposed by Barton ＆ Simko （2002） are effective on capturing the earnings management flexibility, therefore provide evidence consistent with attaining targets more difficultly to firm with less flexibility. While the measure suggested by Kasznik （1999） does not work at some situation.