盈余目标与企业费用操控:来自广告投入的证据

Earnings Benchmarks and Enterprises’ Expenditure Manipulation:Evidence from Advertising Expenditures

在新经济时代背景下,企业的商业模式由"以产品为中心"向"以客户为中心"转型,广告投入对企业品牌塑造和价值提升的重要性日渐凸显。文章以广告投入为研究对象,探究不同盈余目标下的企业费用操控行为。研究结果表明,为实现避免亏损的盈余目标,企业会通过削减广告投入形式的费用操控来达成目标,但并未发现企业在避免利润下滑或满足分析师盈余预测的目标下进行广告投入操控的相关证据。针对避免亏损目标下企业广告投入操控的截面差异的进一步研究表明,广告投入操控在广告投入强度较高、上市时间较短、有分析师跟踪以及税率水平相对较低的企业中更为显著。研究结论不仅对理解不同盈余目标与企业费用操控之间的关系具有参考价值,也对资本市场参与主体和监管部门有所启示。

Under the background of the new economic era,great changes have taken place in the business environment faced by enterprises. The business model of enterprises is changing from the “product-centered” model to the “customer-centered” model. In this trend,brand capital has become an essential factor for enterprises to form core competitiveness. As a long-term investment in brand,with the transformation of enterprise business model,the importance of advertising expenditures in enterprise brand building and value promotion is becoming increasingly prominent. Advertising expenditures are generally the research topic in the field of marketing. This paper extends it to the research field of accounting and corporate finance,trying to take advertising expenditures as the research object,uncover the “black box” of enterprise expense manipulation,and explore the enterprise expense manipulation behavior under different earnings benchmarks(avoiding a loss,avoiding an earnings decline,meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts). And on this basis,we further explore the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation between different enterprises. The results show that enterprises will try to achieve the goal of avoiding a loss by cutting advertising expenditures. However,there is no evidence on enterprises’ advertising expenditure manipulation under the goal of avoiding an earnings decline or meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts. The above conclusions remain unchanged under various robustness tests. Further,the research on the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation to avoid a loss shows that advertising expenditure manipulation is more significant in enterprises with higher advertising expenditure intensity,shorter listing time,analyst tracking and lower tax rate. This paper not only makes a preliminary study on advertising expenditure manipulation in China’s capital market,explores whether advertising expenditures will be used as a means of earnings management under a variety of earnings benchmarks,enriches the academic literature in the field of expenditure manipulation in earnings management,and is helpful to understand the relationship between earnings benchmarks and expenditure manipulation;but also makes a thorough study on the cross-sectional differences of advertising expenditure manipulation under earnings benchmarks,which is helpful to reveal the mechanism behind the expenditure manipulation behavior,and has reference value and enlightenment significance to the subsequent scholars’ research in related fields. In addition,the conclusions of this paper can not only enlighten the participants and regulators of capital market in policy,but also have reference value to understand the relationship between earnings benchmarks and expenditure manipulation in practice.