股权激励能提高上市公司信息透明度吗?——基于未来盈余反应系数的分析

Can Equity Incentives Improve Information Transparency of Chinese Listed Firms? An Analysis Based on Future Earnings Response Coefficient

本文利用实施股权激励的沪深A股上市公司2006—2016年的数据,采用未来盈余反应系数(FERC)衡量公司信息透明度,研究管理层股权激励对公司信息透明度的影响,以及不同所有权性质下这一影响的差异,并进一步探讨上述关系的作用路径。研究发现,随着管理层股权激励薪酬比重的提高,FERC得到了加强,说明股权激励有助于提高公司信息透明度,并且这种作用主要存在于非国有企业中,在国有企业中表现并不明显;上述结论在控制内生性后仍然成立。作用路径分析发现,增加管理层股权激励薪酬比重可以降低应计盈余管理程度,并提高管理层自愿性业绩预测的披露倾向、频率、精度和准确度,说明股权激励主要通过促使管理层向投资者提供更高质量的会计盈余或自愿披露更多而又可靠的私有信息来提高公司信息透明度。本文拓展了股权激励治理效应的研究,同时,研究结论对于提高公司信息透明度和国有企业高管股权激励市场化改革均具有重要的参考价值。

On 31st of December 2005, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) released the “Regulation of Equity Incentive Plans (trial)”, permitting firms to grant executive equity incentives. Since then, equity incentive plans have been rapidly implemented among Chinese listed firms. There are two conflicting views on the effects of managerial equity incentives: alignment and rent-extraction. The former suggests that managers equity incentives better aligns their interest with the interests of shareholders, whereas the latter argues that equity incentives can induce managers to pursue their self-interest at the expense of shareholders. The existing literature provide mixed evidence on the association between managerial equity incentives and various aspects of financial reporting quality as well as voluntary disclosure. The incentive alignment hypothesis indicates that equity incentives can not only improve the firms reported earnings quality, but also encourage managers to voluntarily provide additional information to the market. In contrast, the rent-extraction hypothesis suggests that equity incentives can induce managers to manipulate their firms earnings and voluntary disclosure in order to maximize their own benefit. This paper aims to offer an analysis and discussion of whether the information provided by equity-compensated managers improves Chinese firms information transparency. We particularly focus on how a managerial equity incentives affect the availability of firm-specific information to those market participants outside the publicly-traded firms, which measured by the future earnings response coefficient (i.e. FERC). When equity incentive motivates managers to provide higher quality earnings or voluntarily disclose more private information, it will improve firms information transparency because investors can get more firm-specific information. In contrast, when equity incentive induces managers to manipulate their firms earnings and voluntary disclosure in order to maximize their own benefit, the firms information transparency will be reduced because investors can not obtain real information about the company. Thus, the association between managerial equity incentives and firms information transparency is expected to be positive (negative) under the alignment (rent-extraction) hypothesis. Which effect dominates is an unanswered, empirical question that we address. Using the data of Chinese A-share listed companies that implemented equity incentives during 2006-2016, our analyses yield the following main findings. First, we find that managerial equity incentives enhance the FERC, indicating that managerial equity incentives improve the firms information transparency. This finding supports the incentive alignment hypothesis that disclosures by equity-incentivized managers can mitigate disclosure agency problems. Second, we find that managerial equity incentives does not enhance FERC for state-owned enterprises but enhance FERC for non-state-owned enterprises. Additional analyses show that equity incentives not only reduce accrual earnings management, but also increase the likelihood, frequency, precision and accuracy of voluntary management earnings forecasts, indicating that equity incentives primarily enhance FERC by prompting management to provide higher quality earnings or more and credible voluntary disclosure for investors. These results are robust to a set of sensitivity test, including Hec km an two-stage regression and two-stage-least-squares (2SLS) controlling for endogeneity bias. This paper makes several contributions. Firstly, this paper finds that managerial equity incentives improve firms information transparency, which provide a new research perspective for the investigation of the effectiveness of China's equity incentive system. Secondly, by examining the relationship between managerial equity incentives and the FERC, this paper expands the existing literature examining the factors that affect FERC. Thirdly, the results in this paper are meaningful for the improvement of information transparency of Chinese listed firms, and provide theoretical reference for the market-oriented reform of executive equity incentives in state-owned enterprises.