中国业绩型股权激励公告前的盈余操纵

Earnings Manipulation of China's Performance-vested Equity Incentives before the Announcement

股权激励可能会诱发高管的机会主义行为,导致股权激励不但达不到激励高管的目的,反而加剧了代理问题。本文以公告股权激励方案的中国上市公司为样本,对股权激励公告前的盈余操纵进行了分析。采用考虑生命周期和成长性的应计模型发现,在股权计划草案公告前操控性应计显著为负并有下降的趋势,表明激励公司进行了向下的盈余管理,以达到降低股票期权行权条件或限制性股票的解锁条件。

Equity incentives may induce opportunistic behavior of executives,which cannot align executives with shareholders and may exacerbate the agency problem. This paper examines earnings management around announcement of equity incentive plans in China by using the accrual model which incorporates control for life cycle to lower bias. We find that discretionary accruals of incentive firms is significantly negative and decreases before the announcement of incentive plan,which implies that executives managed earnings downward to decrease vesting hurdle and to conceal performance for subsequent periods. In a robust test,analysts' consensus forecasts about earnings around announcement year are examined and are significantly overestimated. These results indicate that the downward earnings management by award firms may lead to analysts' forecast errors.