盈余管理外文文献及翻译

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德国公认会计准则与国际财务报告准则下的盈余管理【外文翻译】

本科毕业论文（设计）外文翻译外文题目Earnings Management under German GAAP versus IFRS 外文出处 European Accounting Review外文作者 Tendeloo, B.V., and Vanstraelen, A原文：Earnings Management under German GAAP versus IFRS AbstractThis paper addresses the question whether voluntary adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is associated with lower earnings management. Ball et al. (Journal of Accounting and Economics, 36(1–3), pp. 235–270, 2003) argue that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information, but not necessarily a sufficient one. In Germany, a code-law country with low investor protection rights, a relatively large number of companies have chosen to voluntarily adopt IFRS prior to 2005. We investigate whether German companies that have adopted IFRS engage significantly less in earnings management compared to German companies reporting under German generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), while controlling for other differences in earnings management incentives. Our sample, consisting of German listed companies, contains 636 firm-year observations relating to the period 1999–2001. Our results suggest that IFRS-adopters do not present different earnings management behavior compared to companies reporting under German GAAP. These findings contribute to the current debate on whether high quality standards are sufficient and effective in countries with weak investor protection rights. They indicate that voluntary adopters of IFRS in Germany cannot be associated with lower earnings management.1. IntroductionThe International Accounting Standards (IAS), now renamed as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), have been developed to harmonize corporate accounting practice and to answer the need for high quality standards to be adopted inthe world’s major capital markets.Ball et al. (2003) argue that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information, but not necessarily a sufficient one. This paper contributes to this debate by examining whether the adoption of high quality standards like IFRS is associated with high financial reporting quality. In particular, we question whether IFRS a re sufficient to override managers’ incentives to engage in earnings management and affect the quality of reported earnings.Previous research provides evidence that the magnitude of earnings management is on average higher in code-law countries with low investor protection rights, compared to common-law countries with high investor protection rights (Leuz et al., 2003). Hence, to assess whether firms that report under IFRS can be associated with higher earnings quality we focus on Germany, which is a code-law country with relatively low investor protection rights (La Portal et al.,2000). Moreover, a relatively large number of German companies have already voluntarily chosen to adopt IFRS prior to 2005. This allows a comparison between companies that have adopted IFRS versus companies that report under domestic generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).The results of our research show that IFRS do not impose a significant constraint on earnings management, as measured by discretionary accruals. On the contrary, adopting IFRS seems to increase the magnitude of discretionary accruals. Our results further suggest that companies that have adopted IFRS engage more in earnings smoothing, although this effect is significantly reduced when the company has a Big 4 auditor. However, hidden reserves, which are allowed under German GAAP to manage earnings, are not entirely picked up by the traditional accruals measures. When hidden reserves are taken into consideration, our results show that IFRS-adopters do not present different earnings management behavior compared to companies reporting under German GAAP. Hence, our results indicate that adopters of IFRS cannot be associated with lower earnings management. This finding suggests that the adoption of high quality standards is not a sufficient condition for providing high quality information in code-law countries with low investor protection rights.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review the relevant literature and provide the theoretical background of the paper. Section 3 provides an overview of the German accounting system. In Section 4, we formulate the research hypotheses. Section 5 describes the research design. The results of thestudy are presented in Section 6. Finally, in Section 7, we summarize our results, discuss the implications and limitations of our analysis and give suggestions for further research.2. Previous Literature2.1. Adoption of International Accounting StandardsThe International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), which was established in 1973 and now renamed as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), aims to achieve uniformity in the accounting standards used by businesses and other organizations for financial reporting around the world (IASB website). The benefits of the adoption of international accounting standards are considered to be the following. First, it should improve the ability of investors to make informed financial decisions and eliminate confusion arising from different measures of financial position and performance across countries, thereby leading to a reduced risk for investors and a lower cost of capital for companies. Second, it should lower costs arising from multiple reporting. Third, it should encourage international investment. Finally, it should lead to amore efficient allocation of savings worldwide (Street et al., 1999).The original International Accounting Standards were mostly descriptive in nature and contained many alternative treatments. Because of this flexibility and a continuing lack of comparability across countries, the standards came under heavy criticism in the late 1980s. In response to this criticism, the IASC started the Comparability Project in 1987. The revised standards, which became effective in 1995, substantially reduced the alternative treatments and increased the disclosure requirements (Nobes, 2002). In July 1995, the IASC and the International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSCO) agreed to a list of accounting issues that needed to be addressed for obtaining IOSCO’s endorsement of the standards. The subsequent Core Standards Project led again to substantial revisions of IAS. In May 2000, the IASC received IOSCO’s endorsement subject to ‘reconciliation where necessary to address subst antive outstanding issues at a national or regional level’ (IOSCO Press Release, 17 May 2000). The Core Standards Project has brought a wider recognition to IAS around the world. For example, the European Parliament has issued a regulation (1606/2002/EC) requiring all EU listed companies to prepare consolidated financial statements based on InternationalAccounting Standards by 2005. In a number of countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italyand Switzerland, companies were already permitted to prepare consolidated financial statements under IFRS (or US GAAP) prior to 2005.Since German accounting standards and disclosure practices have been criticized in the investor community (Leuz and Verrechia, 2000), a relatively large number of German firms have adopted international accounting standards such as IFRS or US GAAP. This switch is thought to represent a substantial commitment to transparent financial reporting for the following two reasons. First, IFRS adoption itself might effectively enhance financial reporting quality. Second, firms which adopt IFRS or US GAAP might do so because they have higher incentives to report transparently, such as high financing needs. In this case, IFRS serves as a proxy for a credible commitment to higher quality accounting. A study conducted by Dumontier and Raffournier (1998) with Swiss data reveals that early adopters of IFRS ‘are larger, more internationally diversified, less capital intensive and have a more diffuse ownership’. They argue that the decision t o apply IFRS is primarily influenced by political costs and pressures from outside markets. Murphy (1999) also used Swiss data to study the determinants of the adoption of IFRS. She found that companies that adopt IFRS have a higher percentage of foreign sales and a higher number of foreign exchange listings. El-Gazzar et al. (1999) found the same relationships using data from various countries. In addition, they concluded that being domiciled in an EU country and having a lower debt to equity ratio is positively associated with the adoption of IFRS. Other determinants of the adoption of international standards mentioned in the literature include a high profitability, the issuance of equity during the year of adoption, domestic GAAP differing significantly from IFRS or US GAAP and, related to the latter, being domiciled in a country with a bank-oriented financial system (Ashbaugh, 2001; Cuijpers and Buijink, 2003).Not all companies that seek the international investment status that comes with the adoption of IFRS are, however, willing to fulfill all of the requirements and obligations involved. According to a study by Street and Gray (2002) there is a significant non-compliance with IFRS in 1998 company reports, especially in the case of IFRS disclosure requirements. With the revision of IAS 1, effective for financial statements covering periods beginning on or after 1 July 1998, financial statements are prohibited from noting compliance with International Accounting Standards ‘unless they comply with all the requirements of each applicable Standard and each applicable Interpretation of the Standing Interpretations Committee’.All companies included in our IFRS sample mention IFRS compliance in their financial statements after the revised IAS 1 became effective. Nevertheless, adopters of IFRS that appear to be fully compliant might as well be falsely signaling to be of high quality. Ball et al. (2000) argue that firms’ incentives to comply with accounting standards depend on the penalties assessed for non-compliance.When costs of complying to IFRS are viewed to exceed the costs of noncompliance, substantial non-compliance will continue to be a problem. While the main objective of adopting IFRS is considered to be enhancing the quality of the information provided in the financial statements, Ball et al. (2003) further suggest that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information but not a sufficient condition. If the adoption of IFRS cannot be associated with significantly higher financial reporting quality, IFRS adoption cannot serve as a signaling instrument for a credible commitment to higher quality accounting. This study addresses this issue empirically.2.2. Earnings Management: Incentives and ConstraintsOne way of assessing the quality of reported earnings is examining to what extent earnings are managed, with the intention to ‘either mislead some stakeholders about the underlying economic performance of the company or to influence contractual outcomes that depend o n reported accounting numbers’ (Healy and Wahlen, 1999). Incentives for earnings management, either through accounting decisions or structuring transactions, are ample. Managers may be inclined to manage earnings due to the existence of explicit and implic it contracts, the firm’s relation with capital markets, the need for external financing, the political and regulatory environment or several other specific circumstances (Vander Bauwhede, 2001).A number of studies suggest that the quality of reported financial statement information is in large part determined by the underlying economic and institutional factors influencing managers’ and auditors’ incentives. According to Ball et al. (2000) the demand for accounting income differs systematically between common-law and code-law countries. In common-law countries, which are characterized by arm’s length debt and equity markets, a diverse base of investors, high risk of litigation and strong investor protection, accounting information is designed to meet the needs of investors. In code-law countries, capital markets are less active. Investor protection is weak, litigation rates are lower and companies are more financed by banks, other financial institutions and the government, which results in less need for publicdisclosure. Accounting information is therefore designed more to meet other demands, including reduction in political costs and determination of income tax and dividend payments (Ball et al., 2000; La Portaet al., 2000). Leuz et al. (2003) show that earnings management is more prevalent in code-law countries compared to common-law countries. The benefits (e.g.enhanced liquidity) of engaging in earnings management appear to outweigh the costs (e.g. litigation) more in countries with weak investor protection rights. Firms which adopt IFRS, however, can be expected to have incentives to report investor-oriented information and thus engage significantly less in earnings management than non-adopters. On the other hand, low enforcement and low litigation risk might encourage low quality firms to falsely signal to be of high quality by adopting IFRS. This study addresses the question whether adoption of IFRS is associated with lower earnings management in Germany, which La Porta et al. (2000) classify as a country with low investor protection rights.Accounting rules can limit a manager’s ability to distort reported earnings. But the extent to which accounting rules influence reported earnings and curb earnings management depends on how well these rules are enforced (Leuz et al., 2003). Apart from clear accounting standards, strong investor and creditor protection requires a statutory audit, monitoring by supervisors and effective sanctions.A number of studies have shown that Big 4 auditors constitute a constraint on earnings management (DeFond and Jiambalvo, 1991, 1994; Becker et al., 1998; Francis et al., 1999; Gore et al., 2001). However, the results of Maijoor and Vanstraelen (2002) and Francis and Wang (2003) document that the constraint constituted by a Big 4 auditor on earnings management is not uniform across countries. Street and Gray (2002) find support for the fact that being audited by a large audit firm is also positively associated with IFRS compliance, both in the case of disclosure requirements as in the case of measurement and presentation requirements. In this respect, we question whether adoption of IFRS by a company has a stronger effect on the quality of earnings of that company when audited by a Big 4 audit firm.Source: Tendeloo, B.V. and Vanstraelen, A. Earnings management under German GAAP versus IFRS [J]. European Accounting Review, 2005, 14(1): 155-180.译文：德国公认会计准则与国际财务报告准则下的盈余管理摘要：这篇论文阐述的问题是盈余管理的降低是否与国际财务报告准则（IFRS）的自愿采用有关。

盈余管理：一种普遍现象[外文翻译]

外文翻译Earnings Management：A Perspective Material Source: Managerial Finance Author:Messod D.Beneish AbstractAn issue central to accounting research is the extent to which managers alter reported earnings for their own benefit. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a large number of studies investigated the determinants of accounting choice. These studies provided evidence consistent with managers’ incentives to choose beneficial ways of reporting earnings in regulatory and contractual contexts (see Holthausen and Leftwich, 1983, and Watts and Zimmerman, 1986 for reviews of these studies). Since the mid-1980s studies of managerial incentives to alter earnings have focused primarily on accruals.I trace the explosive growth in accrual-based management research to three likely causes. First accruals are the principal product of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and if earnings are managed it is more likely that the earnings management occurs on the accrual rather than the cash flow component of earnings. Second, studying accruals reduces the problems associated with the inability to measure the effect of various accounting choices on earnings (Watts and Zimmerman, 1990). Third，if earnings management is an unobservable component of accruals, it is less likely that investors can unravel the effect of earnings management on reported earnings.The main challenge faced by earnings management researchers is that academics, like investors, are unable to observe, or for that matter, measure the earnings management component of accruals. Indeed, managerial accounting actions intended to increase compensation, avoid covenant default, raise capital, or influence a regulatory outcome are largely unobservable. Consequently, prior work has drawn inferences from joint hypotheses that test both incentives to manage earnings as well as the construct validity of the various accrual models which are used to estimate managers’ accounting discretion. Because extant models of expected accruals provide imprecise estimates of managerial discretion, questions have been raised about whether the unobservable earnings management actions do in fact occur.Notwithstanding research design problems, a variety of evidence suggestive of earnings management has accumulated. In Section 2, I raise three general questions about earnings management: What is it? How frequently does it occur? How do researchers estimate earnings management? Prior investigations of managerial incentives to alter earnings typically fall in three categories, namely studies that examine the effect of contracts in accounting choices, and studies that examine the incentive effects associated with the need to raise external financing. Rather than discussing the evidence along those lines, I have chosen to present the evidence depending on the direction of the incentive context. Thus, I summarize in Sections 3 and 4, what is known about incentives to increase and decrease earnings. In Section 5, I discuss evidence on incentive contexts that provide incentives either to increase or to decrease earnings, and in Section 6, I present conclusions and suggestions for future work.2. Earnings Management2.1 DefinitionsNotice the plural: It reflects my view that academics have no consensus on what is earnings management. There have been at least three attempts at defining earnings management:(1) Managing earnings is “the process of taking deliberate steps within the constraints of generally accepted accounting principles to bring about a desired level of reported earnings.” (Davidso n, Stickney and Weil, 1987,cited in Schipper，1989).(2) Managing earnings is “a purposeful intervention in the external financial reporting process, with the intent of obtaining some private gain (as opposed to say，merely facilitating the neutral operati on of the process).” (Schipper, 1989).(3) “Earnings management occurs when managers use judgment in financial reporting and in structuring transactions to alter financial reports to either mislead some stakeholders about the underlying economic performance of the company or to influence contractual outcomes that depend on reported accounting numbers.” (Healy and Wahlen, 1999).A lack of consensus on the definition of earnings management implies differing interpretations of empirical evidence in studies that seek to detect earnings management，or to provide evidence of earnings management incentives. It is thus useful to compare the above three definitions.All three definitions deal with actions management undertaken within thecontext of financial reporting - including the structuring of transactions so that a desired accounting treatment applies (e.g. pooling, operating leases). However, the second definition also allows earnings management to occur via timing real investment and financing decisions. If the timing issue delays or accelerates a discretionary expenditure for a very short period of time around the firm’s fiscal year, I envision timing real decisions as a means of managing earnings. A problem with the second definition arises if readers interpret any real decisions - including those implying that managers forego profitable opportunities –as earnings management. Given the availability of alternative ways to manage earnings, I believe it is implausible to call earnings management a deviation from rational investment behavior. This reflects my view that earnings management is a financial reporting phenomenon.There are two perspectives on earnings management: the opportunistic perspective holds that managers seek to mislead investors, and the information perspective, first enunciated by Holthausen and Leftwich (1983), under which managerial discretion is a means for managers to reveal to investors their private expectations about the firm’s future cash flows. Much prior work has predicated its conclusions on an opportunistic perspective for earnings management and has not tested the information perspective.2.2 Incidence of earnings managementIf one believes former SEC Chairman Levitt (1998), earnings management is widespread, at least among public companies, as they face pressure to meet analysts’ expectations. Earnings management is also widespread if one relies on analytical arguments. For example, Bagnoli and Watts (2000) suggest that the existence of relative performance evaluation leads firms to manage earnings if they expect competitor firms to manage earnings. Similar prisoner’s dilemma-like arguments for the existence of earnings management appear in Erickson and Wang (1999) in the context of mergers and Shivakumar (2000) in the context of seasoned equity offerings.At the other extreme, we can only be certain that earnings have indeed been managed, when the judicial system, in cases that are brought by the SEC or the Department of Justice, resolves that earnings management has occurred. While it is likely that earnings management occurs more frequently than is observed from judicial actions, it is not clear to me that earnings management is pervasive: it seems implausible that firms face the same motivations to manage earnings over time. Aslater discussed, much of the evidence of earnings management is dependent on firm performance, suggesting that earnings management is more likely to be present when a firm’s performance is either unusually good or unusually bad.3. Evidence of Income Increasing Earnings ManagementI discuss four sources of incentives for income increasing earnings management:(1) debt contracts, (2) compensation agreements, (3) equity offerings, (4) insider trading. The first two sources have been hypothesized in prior positive accounting theory research and the last two sources are explicitly described as reasons behind earnings overstatement in the SEC’s accounting enforcement actions, and have been investigated in recent research.3.1 Debt CovenantsDebt contracts are an important theme in financial accounting research as lenders often use accounting numbers to regulate firms’ activities,e,g. by requiring that certain performance objectives be met or imposing limits to allowed investing and financing activities.The linkage between accounting numbers and debt contracts has been used in studies investigation (i) why economic consequences are observed when firms comply with mandated, or voluntarily make, accounting changes that have no cash flow impact，(ii) the determinants of accounting choice and managers’ exercise of discretion over accounting estimates that impact net income. The assumption is that debt covenants provide incentives for managers to increase earnings either to reduce the restrictiveness of accounting based constraints in debt agreements or to avoid the costs of covenant violations.The results of economic consequences studies have generally been mixed and researchers recently turned to investigating accounting choice in firms that experience actual technical default (Beneish and Press, 1993, 1995; Sweeney, 1994; Defond and Jiambalvo, 1994；and De Angelo, De Angelo and Skinner, 1994). The idea is to increase the power of the tests by focusing on a sample where the effect of violating debt covenants is likely to be more noticeable. While some of the evidence suggests that managers take income increasing actions delay the onset of default (Sweeney, 1994; Defond and Jiambalvo, 1994), other evidence does not (Beneish and Press,1993; DeAngelo,DeAngelo and Skinner,1994). Further, it is not clear such actions actually are sufficient to delay default. Thus, the evidence in these studies on whether managers make income increasing accounting choices to avoid default is mixed. However, examining a large sample of private debt agreements, andmeasuring firms’ closeness to current ratio and tangible net worth constraints, Dichev and Skinner (2000) find significantly greater proportions of firms slightly above the covenant’s violation threshold than below. They suggest that manag ers take actions consistent with avoiding covenant default.3.2 Compensation AgreementsStudies examining the bonus hypothesis (Healy, 1985；Gaveretal, 1995; and Holthausen, Larker and Sloan, 1995) provide evidence consistent with managers altering reported earnings to increase their compensation. Except for Healy (1985)，these studies provide evidence consistent with managers decreasing reported earnings to increase future compensation. In addition, Holthausen et al. (1995) finds little evidence that managers increase income and suggest that the income-increasing evidence in Healy (1985) is induced by his experimental design.3.3 Equity OfferingsA growing body of research examines managers’ incentives to increase reported income in the context of security offerings. Information asymmetry between owners-managers and investors, particularly at the time of initial public offerings, is recognized in prior research.Models such as Leland and Pyle (1977) suggest that the amount of equity retained by insiders signals their private valuation, and models such as Hughes (1986), Titman and Trueman (1986), and Datar et al. (1991) examine the role of the reputation of the auditor on the offer price. In these models, the asymmetry is resolved by the choice of an outside certifier or by a commitment to a contract that penalizes the issuer for untruthful disclosure. Empirical studies assume that information asymmetry remains and use various models to estimate managers’ exercise of discretion over accruals at the time of security offerings.Four studies investigate earnings management as an explanation for the puzzling behavior of post-issuance stock prices. Teoh, Welch and Rao (1998) and Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998a) study earnings management in the context of initial public offerings (IPO), and Rangan (1998) and Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998b) do so in the context of seasoned equity offerings. These studies estimate the extent of earnings management using Jones like models around the time of the security issuance, and correlate their earnings management estimates with post-issue earnings and returns. The evidence presented suggests that estimates of at-issue earnings management are significantly negatively correlated with subsequent earnings and returns performance. The results in these studies suggest that marketparticipants fail to understand the valuation implications of unexpected accruals. While the results are compelling, the conclusion that intentional earnings management at the time of security issuance successfully misleads investors is premature. Beneish (1998b, p.210) expresses reservations about generalizing such a conclusion as follows: “First, the conclusion implies that financial statement fraud is pervasive at the time of issuance. To explain; fraud is defined by the National Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (1993, p.6) as one or more intentional acts designed to deceive other persons and cause them financial loss." If financial statement fraud at issuance is pervasive - e.g. managers are successful in misleading investors. I would expect that firms would fare poorly post-issuance in terms of litigation brought about by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), disgruntled investors, and the plaintiff’s bar. I would also expect managers to fare poorly post-issuance in terms of wealth and employment. I would find evidence of post-issue consequences on firms and managers informative about the existence of at-issue intentional earnings management to mislead investors and believe these issues are worthy of future research.译文盈余管理：一种普遍现象资料来源: 财务管理作者：Messod D. Beneish 摘要：会计研究的核心问题是在某种程度上管理者为了自己的利益而改变报表上的收入。

盈余管理的动机国外文献综述

盈余管理的动机国外文献综述一、引言盈余管理是指企业经理通过对财务报表数据的操控，更改企业财务报表数据，从而影响企业财务报告利润，最终影响企业信息外部使用者对企业的决策的行为。

Roychowdhury （2006年）通过解释盈余管理的目的而对盈余管理进行了定义。

经理人是被企业所雇佣的高级员工，他们必须尽力使股东对他们的经营成果满意；此外，企业管理人员也需要完成已经制定的财务目标。

为了实现以上的目标，企业管理人员往往会通过特殊手段进行盈余管理，这个手段实施的过程就是盈余管理。

关于企业管理层为什么进行盈余管理，国外学者各抒己见。

Watts和Zimmerman（1986年）明确指出有激励因素导致管理层进行盈余管理。

他们列明报酬契约、债务契约以及政治原因都是管理层进行盈余管理的动因。

Aharony等人（2000年）选取中国B股和H股的IPO公司作为样本，他们确认了在IPO公司当中存在着盈余管理现象。

Hunton等人（2006年），Libby和Kinney（2000年）指出企业管理层会为了满足财务分析师的预测而进行盈余管理，而这直接促成了企业股价的增长。

在此基础上，其他学者对盈余管理的动机进行了进一步的研究。

二、契约动机（一）债务契约Defond和Jiambalvo（1994年）以及Sweeney（1994年）论证了契约是盈余管理的动机之一。

Defond和Jiambalvo（1994年）通过对有债务契约的公司的研究，发现公司管理层会为了避免违反债务契约而进行盈余管理。

具体来说，那些有可能违反债务契约的公司的管理层会通过盈余管理来虚增企业财务报表的利润，由此避免因违反契约对企业造成的不良影响。

Sweeney（1994年）也阐述了盈余管理和债务契约之间存在联系。

研究表明，违约的公司更有可能进行盈余管理。

（二）报酬契约Holthausen等人（1995年）提出契约可以被视为盈余管理的动机之一。

报酬契约促使企业管理层进行盈余管理。

《IPO公司盈余管理探究国内外文献综述2400字》

IPO公司盈余管理研究国内外文献综述国外研究现状国外学者对盈余管理的研究相对较早，美国学者Schipper于1989年提出了“盈余管理”的概念，他认为企业管理当局会对公开披露的财务信息进行粉饰调节，以实现自身利益的最大化，不同于利润操纵，盈余管理是在不违反会计准则的前提下，对会计政策和会计估计进行主观选择Scott William R (1997)认为盈余管理就是企业管理层为了实现公司利益或者市场价值最大化的目的，而选择相应的会计政策的行为。

PaulM Healy和James M Wahlen (1999)指出盈余管理具体表现在企业管理当局通过调整具体的交易活动，影响公司会计报告信息，以此实现误导利益相关方决策的目的。

企业管理层会出于种种目的操纵盈余信息，Watts和Zimmerman(1990)认为管理层会出于报酬契约、债务契约和政治方面的考虑，会采取一定的手段影响企业对外披露的财务信息。

Healy (1999)发现，一些上市公司管理者会为了获得奖金报酬，对公司业绩进行调整，扮靓财务数据。

Jones (1991)研究发现，一些企业会为了申请政府税收减免而递延当年收益。

外部的监管与监督是影响企业IPO盈余管理的重要外部因素，严格的外部监管会在一定程度上约束IPO公司的盈余管理活动。

Cohen (2000)研究发现在萨班斯法案颁布后，由于管理单位加大对于上市公司盈余管理的监管和处罚，上市公司更倾向于采用真实活动的盈余管理。

Rowchoydhury C 2006研究发现，成熟的机构投资者会识别影响公司长远利益的盈余管理活动，并采取相应的遏制措施。

国内研究现状顾明润和田存志(2012)认为由于我国一级资本市场证券定价市场功能相对较弱，许多IPO公司会为了提高股票的发行价格而对公司财务报告进行粉饰。

同时，由于我国资本市场IPO制度仍处于核准制向注册制过渡的阶段，对公司IPO 资格仍有较高的要求，张征和崔毅(2014)认为IPO公司会出于满足发行条件和获得更多的发行收入的目的，在会计准则允许的范围内对盈余进行调整。

现行企业会计准则下盈余管理分析研究外文翻译

中文2300字外文翻译之一A Review of the Earnings Management Literature andIts Implications for Standard SettingAuthor：Paul M. Healy and James M. WahlenNationality：AmericaDerivation: Accounting Horizons 365-383INTRODUCTIONIn this paper we review the academic evidence on earnings management. The primary purpose of this review is to summarize the implications of scholarly evidence on earnings management to help accounting standard setters and regulators assess the pervasiveness of earnings management and the overall integrity of financial reporting. This review is also aimed at identifying fruitful areas for future academic research on earnings management.Standard setters define the accounting language that management uses to communicate with t he firm’s external By creating a framework that independent auditors and the SEC can enforce, accounting standards can provide a relatively low-cost and credible means for corporate managers to report information on theirfirms’performance to external capital providers and other Ideally, financial reporting therefore helps the best-performing firms in the economy to distinguish themselves from poor performers and facilitates efficient resource allocation and stewardship decisions by stakeholders.If financial reports are to convey managers’ information on their firms’performance, standards must permit managers to exercise judgment in financial reporting. Managers can then use their knowledge about the business and its opportunities to select reportin g methods, estimates, and disclosures that match the firms’ business economics, potentially increasing the value of accounting as a form of communication. However, because auditing is imperfect, management’s use of judgment also creates opportunities for “earnings management,” in which managers choose reporting methods andestimates that do not accurately reflect their firms’ underlying economics.The Chairman of the SEC, Arthur Levitt, recently expressed concerns over earnings management and its effect on resource allocation. He noted that management abuses of “big bath” restructuring charges, premature revenue recognition, “cookie jar”reserves, and write-offs of purchased in-process R&D are threatening the credibility of financial reporting. To address these concerns, the SEC is examining new disclosure requirements and has formed an earnings management task force to crack down on firms that manage earnings. The SEC also expects to require more firms to restate Reported earnings and will step up enforcement of disclosure requirements.A number of recent studies, however, sharpen the focus of their tests to examine earnings management using specific accruals, such as bank loan loss provisions, claim loss reserves for property-casualty insurers, and deferred tax valuation allowances.There is evidence that banks use loan loss provisions and insurers use claim loss reserves to manage earnings, particularly to meet regulatory requirements. There is little evidence that firms manage earnings using deferred tax valuation allowances.Much of the evidence on the capital market consequences of earnings management shows that investors are not “fooled” by earnings management and that financial statements provide useful information to investors. Current earnings, which reflect management reporting judgment, have been widely found to be value-relevant and are typically better predictors of future cash flow performance than are current cash flows.Answers to the above questions are difficult to infer from current studies for a number of reasons. First, most academic studies attempt to document earnings management, but do not provide evidence on its extent and scope. Consequently, existing evidence does not help standard setters to assess whether current standards are largely effective in facilitating communication with investors, or whether they encourage widespread earnings management. Second, most studies have examined unexpected accruals for evidence of earnings management. While this research provides a useful summary index of earnings management, it does not show which standards are effective infacilitating communication between managers and investors and which are ineffective.The studies that examine the effects of earnings management on the capital markets leave a number of unanswered questions for future research. First, as noted above, how pervasive is earnings management for capital market reasons, both amongthe firms sampled and for the population of firms? Second, what is the magnitude of any earnings management? Third, what specific accruals do firms (other than banks and insurers) use to manage earnings? Fourth, why do some firms appear to manage earnings whereas others with similar incentives do not? Finally, under what conditions do market participants detect and, therefore, react to earnings management, and under what conditions do they fail to detect earnings management? For example, do required disclosures that make the use of accounting judgment more transparent help to mitigate the impact of earnings management on resource allocation?In summary, the earnings management studies strongly suggest that regulatory considerations induce firms to manage earnings. There is limited evidence on whether this behavior is widespread or rare, however, and very little evidence on the effect on regulators or investors.盈余管理文献回顾及其对标准设置的启迪作者：Paul M. Healy and James M. Wahlen国籍：美国选自：会计天涯365-383介绍:本文咱们回顾一些关于盈余管理的相关学术的研究，本文回顾的主要目的是为了总括学者们和会计标准的设定者和管理者评估盈余管理的普遍性和对于财务报表的完整性，本文献同时志于对盈余管理的未来学术研究提供有效的鉴戒。

外文翻译--德国公认会计准则与国际财务报告准则下的盈余管理

本科毕业论文（设计）外文翻译外文题目Earnings Management under German GAAP versus IFRS 外文出处 European Accounting Review外文作者 Tendeloo, B.V., and Vanstraelen, A原文：Earnings Management under German GAAP versus IFRS AbstractThis paper addresses the question whether voluntary adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is associated with lower earnings management. Ball et al. (Journal of Accounting and Economics, 36(1–3), pp. 235–270, 2003) argue that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information, but not necessarily a sufficient one. In Germany, a code-law country with low investor protection rights, a relatively large number of companies have chosen to voluntarily adopt IFRS prior to 2005. We investigate whether German companies that have adopted IFRS engage significantly less in earnings management compared to German companies reporting under German generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), while controlling for other differences in earnings management incentives. Our sample, consisting of German listed companies, contains 636 firm-year observations relating to the period 1999–2001. Our results suggest that IFRS-adopters do not present different earnings management behavior compared to companies reporting under German GAAP. These findings contribute to the current debate on whether high quality standards are sufficient and effective in countries with weak investor protection rights. They indicate that voluntary adopters of IFRS in Germany cannot be associated with lower earnings management.1. IntroductionThe International Accounting Standards (IAS), now renamed as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), have been developed to harmonize corporate accounting practice and to answer the need for high quality standards to be adopted inthe world’s major capital markets.Ball et al. (2003) argue that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information, but not necessarily a sufficient one. This paper contributes to this debate by examining whether the adoption of high quality standards like IFRS is associated with high financial reporting quality. In particular, we question whether IFRS are sufficient to override managers’ incentives to engage in earnings management and affect the quality of reported earnings.Previous research provides evidence that the magnitude of earnings management is on average higher in code-law countries with low investor protection rights, compared to common-law countries with high investor protection rights (Leuz et al., 2003). Hence, to assess whether firms that report under IFRS can be associated with higher earnings quality we focus on Germany, which is a code-law country with relatively low investor protection rights (La Portal et al.,2000). Moreover, a relatively large number of German companies have already voluntarily chosen to adopt IFRS prior to 2005. This allows a comparison between companies that have adopted IFRS versus companies that report under domestic generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).The results of our research show that IFRS do not impose a significant constraint on earnings management, as measured by discretionary accruals. On the contrary, adopting IFRS seems to increase the magnitude of discretionary accruals. Our results further suggest that companies that have adopted IFRS engage more in earnings smoothing, although this effect is significantly reduced when the company has a Big 4 auditor. However, hidden reserves, which are allowed under German GAAP to manage earnings, are not entirely picked up by the traditional accruals measures. When hidden reserves are taken into consideration, our results show that IFRS-adopters do not present different earnings management behavior compared to companies reporting under German GAAP. Hence, our results indicate that adopters of IFRS cannot be associated with lower earnings management. This finding suggests that the adoption of high quality standards is not a sufficient condition for providing high quality information in code-law countries with low investor protection rights.The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review the relevant literature and provide the theoretical background of the paper. Section 3 provides an overview of the German accounting system. In Section 4, we formulate the research hypotheses. Section 5 describes the research design. The results of thestudy are presented in Section 6. Finally, in Section 7, we summarize our results, discuss the implications and limitations of our analysis and give suggestions for further research.2. Previous Literature2.1. Adoption of International Accounting StandardsThe International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC), which was established in 1973 and now renamed as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), aims to achieve uniformity in the accounting standards used by businesses and other organizations for financial reporting around the world (IASB website). The benefits of the adoption of international accounting standards are considered to be the following. First, it should improve the ability of investors to make informed financial decisions and eliminate confusion arising from different measures of financial position and performance across countries, thereby leading to a reduced risk for investors and a lower cost of capital for companies. Second, it should lower costs arising from multiple reporting. Third, it should encourage international investment. Finally, it should lead to amore efficient allocation of savings worldwide (Street et al., 1999).The original International Accounting Standards were mostly descriptive in nature and contained many alternative treatments. Because of this flexibility and a continuing lack of comparability across countries, the standards came under heavy criticism in the late 1980s. In response to this criticism, the IASC started the Comparability Project in 1987. The revised standards, which became effective in 1995, substantially reduced the alternative treatments and increased the disclosure requirements (Nobes, 2002). In July 1995, the IASC and the International Organization of Securities Commission (IOSCO) agreed to a list of accounting issues that needed to be addressed for obtaining IOSCO’s endorsement of the standards. The subsequent Core Standards Project led again to substantial revisions of IAS. In May 2000, the IASC received IOSCO’s endorsement subject to ‘reconciliation where necessary to address subs tantive outstanding issues at a national or regional level’ (IOSCO Press Release, 17 May 2000). The Core Standards Project has brought a wider recognition to IAS around the world. For example, the European Parliament has issued a regulation (1606/2002/EC) requiring all EU listed companies to prepare consolidated financial statements based on InternationalAccounting Standards by 2005. In a number of countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italyand Switzerland, companies were already permitted to prepare consolidated financial statements under IFRS (or US GAAP) prior to 2005.Since German accounting standards and disclosure practices have been criticized in the investor community (Leuz and Verrechia, 2000), a relatively large number of German firms have adopted international accounting standards such as IFRS or US GAAP. This switch is thought to represent a substantial commitment to transparent financial reporting for the following two reasons. First, IFRS adoption itself might effectively enhance financial reporting quality. Second, firms which adopt IFRS or US GAAP might do so because they have higher incentives to report transparently, such as high financing needs. In this case, IFRS serves as a proxy for a credible commitment to higher quality accounting. A study conducted by Dumontier and Raffournier (1998) with Swiss data reveals that early adopters of IFRS ‘are larger, more internationally diversified, less capital intensive and have a more diffuse ownership’. They argue that the decision to apply IFRS is primarily influenced by political costs and pressures from outside markets. Murphy (1999) also used Swiss data to study the determinants of the adoption of IFRS. She found that companies that adopt IFRS have a higher percentage of foreign sales and a higher number of foreign exchange listings. El-Gazzar et al. (1999) found the same relationships using data from various countries. In addition, they concluded that being domiciled in an EU country and having a lower debt to equity ratio is positively associated with the adoption of IFRS. Other determinants of the adoption of international standards mentioned in the literature include a high profitability, the issuance of equity during the year of adoption, domestic GAAP differing significantly from IFRS or US GAAP and, related to the latter, being domiciled in a country with a bank-oriented financial system (Ashbaugh, 2001; Cuijpers and Buijink, 2003).Not all companies that seek the international investment status that comes with the adoption of IFRS are, however, willing to fulfill all of the requirements and obligations involved. According to a study by Street and Gray (2002) there is a significant non-compliance with IFRS in 1998 company reports, especially in the case of IFRS disclosure requirements. With the revision of IAS 1, effective for financial statements covering periods beginning on or after 1 July 1998, financial statements are prohibited from noting compliance with International Accounting Standards ‘unless they comply with all the requirements of each applicable Standard and each applicable Interpretation of the Standing Interpretations Committee’.All companies included in our IFRS sample mention IFRS compliance in their financial statements after the revised IAS 1 became effective. Nevertheless, adopters of IFRS that appear to be fully compliant might as well be falsely signaling to be of high quality. Ball et al. (2000) argue that firms’ incentives to comply with accounting standards depend on the penalties assessed for non-compliance.When costs of complying to IFRS are viewed to exceed the costs of noncompliance, substantial non-compliance will continue to be a problem. While the main objective of adopting IFRS is considered to be enhancing the quality of the information provided in the financial statements, Ball et al. (2003) further suggest that adopting high quality standards might be a necessary condition for high quality information but not a sufficient condition. If the adoption of IFRS cannot be associated with significantly higher financial reporting quality, IFRS adoption cannot serve as a signaling instrument for a credible commitment to higher quality accounting. This study addresses this issue empirically.2.2. Earnings Management: Incentives and ConstraintsOne way of assessing the quality of reported earnings is examining to what extent earnings are managed, with the intention to ‘either mislead some stakeholders about the underlying economic performance of the company or to influence contractual outcomes that depend on reported accounting numbers’ (Healy and Wahlen, 1999). Incentives for earnings management, either through accounting decisions or structuring transactions, are ample. Managers may be inclined to manage earnings due to the existence of explicit and impli cit contracts, the firm’s relation with capital markets, the need for external financing, the political and regulatory environment or several other specific circumstances (Vander Bauwhede, 2001).A number of studies suggest that the quality of reported financial statement information is in large part determined by the underlying economic and institutional factors influencing managers’ and auditors’ incentives. According to Ball et al. (2000) the demand for accounting income differs systematically between common-law and code-law countries. In common-law countries, which are characterized by arm’s length debt and equity markets, a diverse base of investors, high risk of litigation and strong investor protection, accounting information is designed to meet the needs of investors. In code-law countries, capital markets are less active. Investor protection is weak, litigation rates are lower and companies are more financed by banks, other financial institutions and the government, which results in less need for publicdisclosure. Accounting information is therefore designed more to meet other demands, including reduction in political costs and determination of income tax and dividend payments (Ball et al., 2000; La Portaet al., 2000). Leuz et al. (2003) show that earnings management is more prevalent in code-law countries compared to common-law countries. The benefits (e.g.enhanced liquidity) of engaging in earnings management appear to outweigh the costs (e.g. litigation) more in countries with weak investor protection rights. Firms which adopt IFRS, however, can be expected to have incentives to report investor-oriented information and thus engage significantly less in earnings management than non-adopters. On the other hand, low enforcement and low litigation risk might encourage low quality firms to falsely signal to be of high quality by adopting IFRS. This study addresses the question whether adoption of IFRS is associated with lower earnings management in Germany, which La Porta et al. (2000) classify as a country with low investor protection rights.Accounting rules can limit a manager’s ability to distort reported earnings. But the extent to which accounting rules influence reported earnings and curb earnings management depends on how well these rules are enforced (Leuz et al., 2003). Apart from clear accounting standards, strong investor and creditor protection requires a statutory audit, monitoring by supervisors and effective sanctions.A number of studies have shown that Big 4 auditors constitute a constraint on earnings management (DeFond and Jiambalvo, 1991, 1994; Becker et al., 1998; Francis et al., 1999; Gore et al., 2001). However, the results of Maijoor and Vanstraelen (2002) and Francis and Wang (2003) document that the constraint constituted by a Big 4 auditor on earnings management is not uniform across countries. Street and Gray (2002) find support for the fact that being audited by a large audit firm is also positively associated with IFRS compliance, both in the case of disclosure requirements as in the case of measurement and presentation requirements. In this respect, we question whether adoption of IFRS by a company has a stronger effect on the quality of earnings of that company when audited by a Big 4 audit firm.Source: Tendeloo, B.V. and Vanstraelen, A. Earnings management under German GAAP versus IFRS [J]. European Accounting Review, 2005, 14(1): 155-180.译文：德国公认会计准则与国际财务报告准则下的盈余管理摘要：这篇论文阐述的问题是盈余管理的降低是否与国际财务报告准则（IFRS）的自愿采用有关。

激励报告的重要性：欧洲的私营和公共企业的盈余管理【外文翻译】

外文翻译外文题目The importance of Reporting Incentives: Earnings Management in European Private and Public Firms.外文出处Accounting Review外文作者Davia C. Burgstahler , Luzi Hail and Christian Leuz 原文：The importance of Reporting Incentives: Earnings Management in European Private and Public Firms.Much of the international accounting debate has focused on accounting standards per se, which are often viewed as the primary input for high-quality accounting (e.g., Levitt 1998). Consistent with this view, harmonization efforts within the European Union have largely focused on eliminating differences in accounting standards across countries or adopting a common set of standards (e.g., Van Hulle 2004). However, it is important to also examine the role of institutional factors and capital market forces in shaping firms’ incentives to report informative earnings. The application of standards involves judgment and underlying measurements are often based on private information. The resulting discretion can be used by corporate insiders either to make reported earnings more informative about the firm’s economic performance or to serve other and less benign interests.For this reason, reporting incentives and the forces shaping them are likely to play an integral role for accounting quality. While this insight is not new (e.g., Watts and Zimmerman 1986), it is often overlooked in international standard setting.1 To empirically document the importance of reporting incentives, we examine the properties of reported earnings of private and public firms in the European Union (EU). The European setting provides a unique opportunity because EU accounting regulation is based on a firm’s legal form, rather than listing status. Thus, private limited companies face largely the same accounting standards as publicly tradedcorporations, but are subject to very different capital market forces. This feature allows us to study the role of reporting incentives and the demand for information created by public equity markets, both of which are issues of fundamental economic importance. Several prior studies suggest that equity markets have a negative impact on accounting quality (e.g., Teoh et al. 1998a, 1998b; Beattyet al. 2002). However, these studies are either limited to specific industries or major corporate events. Thus, the first-order effect of public equity markets on accounting quality is still an open issue and one that we can analyze in the EU setting. The setting also allows us to examine the effects of cross-country variation in firms’ institutional environments and to explore how legal institutions and capital market forces interact in shaping the reporting behavior of private and public firms.We hypothesize that capital markets as well as critical aspects of a firm’s institutional environment determine the role of earnings, e.g., its importance in resolving information asymmetries and in communicating with outside parties (e.g., Watts and Zimmerman 1986; Ball 2001). This role in turn influences how corporate insiders use reporting discretion, which crucially determines the properties of reported earnings.The use of discretion and the resulting informativenes (or opacity) of earnings are difficult to measure because true economic performance is unobservable. Previous work in international accounting has often focused on the conservatism dimension of accounting quality, i.e., the extent to which losses are incorporated into earnings on a timely basis (e.g., Ball et al. 2000; Ball et al. 2003; Ball et al. 2005; Bushman and Piotroski 2006; Peeket al. 2006). As accounting quality is a broad concept with multiple dimensions, it is important to extend empirical results beyond the conservatism dimension. In this study, we focus on another dimension of accounting quality, namely the degree of earnings manag management. 2 We rely on an earnings management index suggested by Leuz et al. (2003), which is based on four different proxies. The underlying measures are designed to capture a variety of earnings management practices, such as earnings smoothing and accrual manipulations.3 We also conduct sensitivity analyses using alternative earnings management metricssimilar to those used by Lang et al. (2003) and Lang et al. (2006) as well as measures of conservatism.Our results are similar across these measures and consistent with the idea that all these measures capture aspects of earnings informativeness.We document substantial variation in earnings informativeness across private and public firms from 13 EU countries, despite decades of accounting harmonization. More importantly, we show that differences in firms’ reporting incentives explain this variation. In particular, we find that earnings management is more pervasive in private firms than in publicly traded firms. Thus, contrary to recent allegations that capital markets exacerbate incentives to manage earnings, our findings suggest that the first-order effect of public equity markets is to improve earnings informativeness, either by providing incentives to make earnings more informative or, alternatively, by screening out firms with less informative earnings in the going public process. We also document that earnings management is more pronounced in countries with weaker legal systems and enforcement. This finding holds for both private and public firms and highlights the central importance of enforcement mechanisms.Moving beyond general characterizations of legal systems, we explore the interaction between market forces and other institutional variables that have the potential to differentially affect private and public firms: (1) the degree of alignment between financial and tax accounting, (2) remaining differences in EU accounting rules, (3) the level of required disclosures in public securities offerings and associated enforcement, (4) the level of minority-shareholder protection, and (5) the structure and activity of capital markets.The analysis of these interactions supports our earlier finding that capital market forces, by and large, improve the informativeness of earnings. We document that stronger tax alignment is associated with more earnings management, but this effect is mitigated for public firms. We find that legal institutions designed to facilitate equity financing at arm’s length in public markets, such as strong minority-shareholder rights and extensive disclosure requirements, are associated with lower levels of earnings management primarily for publicly traded firms, suggesting that markets andinstitutions reinforce each other. Finally, in countries with large and highly developed equity markets, public firms engage in even less earnings management, which again suggests that strong capital market s and arm’s-length financing improve earnings informativeness.Our study contributes to the literature in several ways. First, by comparing the reporting behavior of private and public firms, we shed light on the first-order effects of public equity markets. Prior evidence on differences in earnings quality between public and private firms is conflicting, and either confined to a particular country (Vander Bauwhede et al. 2003; Ball and Shivakumar 2005), a single regulated industry (Beatty and Harris 1999; Beatty etal. 2002) or specific corporate events (Teoh et al. 1998a, 1998b). Our paper adds to this limited body of work by examining a large sample of public and private firms across many industries and countries, and outside of specific corporate events. Our findings generally support the notion that the first-order effect of capital market forces is to improve reporting quality.Second, we contribute to a fairly recent literature that analyzes the effects of capital market incentives on the properties of reported earnings but is limited to public firms (e.g.,Ball et al. 2005; Bushman and Piotroski 2006). Data on private and public firms allows us to shed light on the interplay of market forces stemming from public equity with legal institutions that facili tate arm’s-length financing in public markets, such as minorityshareholder protection and securities regulation. Moreover, we can study the extent to which equity-based financial systems and highly developed capital markets explain differences in reporting behavior. Our findings suggest that these institutions and capital market characteristics tend to reinforce the first-order effect of publicly traded equity.Third, there is little evidence on how institutional factors shape the reporting behavior of private firms. With the exception of a concurrent study by Peek et al. (2006) that looks at earnings conservatism across a sample of private and public EU firms, prior work documents institutional effects on firms’ reporting behavior using public firms only (e.g., Ali and Hwang 2000; Ball et al. 2000; Fan and Wong 2002; Ball et al. 2003; Leuz et al. 2003; Bushman et al. 2004). While it is safe to assumethat institutions affect private firms as well, it is a priori not obvious in what way. We show that there are some institutions like legal enforcement that matter to both public and private firms. But there are others, such as tax alignment, where the negative effect on reporting quality differs across public and private firms, displaying the mitigating influence of market forces.Finally, our paper contributes to the regulatory issue of accounting harmonization (e.g.,Gernon and Wallace 1995; Saudagaran and Meek 1997) and the debate on accounting convergence (Joos and Lang 1994; Land and Lang 2002; Bradshaw and Miller 2005; Joos and Wysocki 2004). Our paper provides evidence supporting the conjecture that effective accounting harmonization is unlikely to be achieved by accounting standards alone (e.g., Ball 2001).The paper is organized as follows. Section II develops our hypotheses. Section III describes the data and the research design. In Section IV, we present the evidence on the relation between listing status, legal enforcement, and earnings management. In Section V, we analyze the role of additional institutional factors that have the potential to differentially affect private and public firms. Section VI concludes.THE EFFECT OF CAPITAL MARKETS AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTORSON REPORTED EARNINGSOur analysis is based on the recognition that accounting standards provide considerable discretion to firms in preparing their financial statements. Corporate insiders can use their private information to report earnings that more accurately reflect firm performance and are more informative to outside parties. However, if earnings play a minor role in communicating performance to outsiders, then insiders are unlikely to do so. Instead, reporting choices may be governed by other considerations, e.g., by the desire to minimize taxes or determine dividend payments. Moreover, corporate insiders can use reporting discretion to hide poor economic performance, achieve certain earnings targets, or avoid covenant violations.Given insiders’ information advantage, it is difficult to constrain such behavior.4 These arguments suggest t hat factors that define the role of earnings and shape firms’reporting incentives play an integral role in determining the properties of reportedearnings, such as their informativeness to corporate outsiders (e.g., Ball et al. 2000).5 We argue that ca pital market forces and the home country’s institutional features are such factors.Capital Market ForcesPrivately held firms and those with publicly traded equity securities face very different demands for accounting information. External financing in public equity markets creates the demand for information that is useful in evaluating and monitoring the firm. Arm’slength equity investors do not have private access to corporate information and rely heavily on public information, such as financial statements and reported earnings. If the quality of this information is poor, then outside investors will be reluctant to supply capital to firms.As a result, publicly traded firms have stronger incentives to provide financial statements that help outsiders assess economic performance. In addition, the going public process may screen out firms with less informative earnings that are difficult to evaluate for outside investors. Thus, regardless of the mechanism, being public is likely to be associated with higher reporting quality.In contrast, privately held firms have relatively concentrated ownership structures and hence can efficiently communicate among shareholders via private channels. Because financial statements and reported earnings assume a less important role in communicating firm performance, private firms have relatively fewer incentives to report informative earnings.Accordingly, private firms can place greater relative weight on different roles for reported earnings than can public firms. For instance, it is of a lesser concern to private firms that managing earnings to minimize taxes may make earnings less informative to outsiders. Alternatively, earnings can be used in determining dividends and other payouts to firms’ stakeholders. As in Ball and Sh ivakumar (2005), we argue that these other uses are likely to render earnings of private firms less informative. While these arguments suggest that the first-order effect of public securities markets is to create incentives to report earnings that reflect economic performance, we recognize that there are trade-offs and potentially important countervailing effects.For instance, controlling insiders in public firms might expropriate outside investors by consuming large private control benefits. As an attempt to hide these activities and prevent outsider intervention, they could mask firm performance by managing reported earnings (Leuz et al. 2003).译文：激励报告的重要性：欧洲的私营和公共企业的盈余管理（外文出处：会计评论）在国际会计争论中关注较多的是会计准则本身，这往往是作为高品质的会计初级输入效果（例如，莱维特1998年）。

盈余管理：一种普遍现象[外文翻译]

盈余管理：一种普遍现象[外文翻译]外文翻译Earnings Management：A Perspective Material Source: Managerial Finance Author:Messod D.Beneish Abstract An issue central to accounting research is the extent to which managers alter reported earnings for their own benefit. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a large number of studies investigated the determinants of accounting choice. These studies provided evidence consistent with managers’ incentives to choose beneficial ways of reporting earnings in regulatory and contractual contexts (see Holthausen and Leftwich, 1983, and Watts and Zimmerman, 1986 for reviews of these studies). Since the mid-1980s studies of managerial incentives to alter earnings have focused primarily on accruals.I trace the explosive growth in accrual-based management research to three likely causes. First accruals are the principal product of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and if earnings are managed it is more likely that the earnings management occurs on the accrual rather than the cash flow component of earnings. Second, studying accruals reduces the problems associated with the inability to measure the effect of various accounting choices on earnings (Watts and Zimmerman, 1990). Third，if earnings management is an unobservable component of accruals, it is less likely that investors can unravel the effect of earnings management on reported earnings.The main challenge faced by earnings management researchers is that academics, like investors, are unable to observe, or for that matter, measure the earnings management component of accruals. Indeed, managerial accounting actionsintended to increase compensation, avoid covenant default, raise capital, or influence a regulatory outcome are largely unobservable. Consequently, prior work has drawn inferences from joint hypotheses that test both incentives to manage earnings as well as the construct validity of the various accrual models which are used to estimate managers’ accounting discretion. Because extant models of expected accruals provide imprecise estimates of managerial discretion, questions have been raised about whether the unobservable earnings management actions do in fact occur.Notwithstanding research design problems, a variety of evidence suggestive of earnings management has accumulated. In Section 2, I raise three general questions about earnings management: What is it? How frequently does it occur? How do researchers estimate earnings management? Prior investigations of managerial incentives to alter earnings typically fall in three categories, namely studies that examine the effect of contracts in accounting choices, and studies that examine the incentive effects associated with the need to raise external financing. Rather than discussing the evidence along those lines, I have chosen to present the evidence depending on the direction of the incentive context. Thus, I summarize in Sections 3 and 4, what is known about incentives to increase and decrease earnings. In Section 5, I discuss evidence on incentive contexts that provide incentives either to increase or to decrease earnings, and in Section 6, I present conclusions and suggestions for future work.2. Earnings Management2.1 DefinitionsNotice the plural: It reflects my view that academics have no consensus on what is earnings management. There have been atleast three attempts at defining earnings management:(1) Managing earnings is “the process of taking deliberate steps within the constraints of generally accepted accounting principles to bring about a desired level of reported earnings.” (Davidso n, Stickney and Weil, 1987,cited in Schipper，1989).(2) Managing earnings is “a purposeful intervention in the external financial reporting process, with the intent of obtaining some private gain (as opposed to say，merely facilitating the neutral operati on of the process).” (Schipper, 1989).(3) “Earnings management occurs when managers use judgment in financial reporting and in structuring transactions to alter financial reports to either mislead some stakeholders about the underlying economic performance of the company or to influence contractual outcomes that depend on reported accounting numbers.” (Healy and Wahlen, 1999).A lack of consensus on the definition of earnings management implies differing interpretations of empirical evidence in studies that seek to detect earnings management，or to provide evidence of earnings management incentives. It is thus useful to compare the above three definitions.All three definitions deal with actions management undertaken within thecontext of financial reporting - including the structuring of transactions so that a desired accounting treatment applies (e.g. pooling, operating leases). However, the second definition also allows earnings management to occur via timing real investment and financing decisions. If the timing issue delays or accelerates a discretionary expenditure for a very short period of time around the firm’s fiscal year, I envision timing real decisions as a means of managing earnings. A problem with the seconddefinition arises if readers interpret any real decisions - including those implying that managers forego profitable opportunities –as earnings management. Given the availability of alternative ways to manage earnings, I believe it is implausible to call earnings management a deviation from rational investment behavior. This reflects my view that earnings management is a financial reporting phenomenon.There are two perspectives on earnings management: the opportunistic perspective holds that managers seek to mislead investors, and the information perspective, first enunciated by Holthausen and Leftwich (1983), under which managerial discretion is a means for managers to reveal to investors their private expectation s about the firm’s future cash flows. Much prior work has predicated its conclusions on an opportunistic perspective for earnings management and has not tested the information perspective.2.2 Incidence of earnings managementIf one believes former SEC Chairman Levitt (1998), earnings management is widespread, at least among public companies, as they face pressure to meet analysts’ expectations. Earnings management is also widespread if one relies on analytical arguments. For example, Bagnoli and Watts (2000) suggest that the existence of relative performance evaluation leads firms to manage earnings if they expect competitor firms to manage earnings. Similar prisoner’s dilemma-like arguments for the existence of earnings management appear in Erickson and Wang (1999) in the context of mergers and Shivakumar (2000) in the context of seasoned equity offerings.At the other extreme, we can only be certain that earnings have indeed been managed, when the judicial system, in casesthat are brought by the SEC or the Department of Justice, resolves that earnings management has occurred. While it is likely that earnings management occurs more frequently than is observed from judicial actions, it is not clear to me that earnings management is pervasive: it seems implausible that firms face the same motivations to manage earnings over time. As later discussed, much of the evidence of earnings management is dependent on firm performance, suggesting that earnings management is more likely to b e present when a firm’s performance is either unusually good or unusually bad.3. Evidence of Income Increasing Earnings ManagementI discuss four sources of incentives for income increasing earnings management:(1) debt contracts, (2) compensation agreements, (3) equity offerings, (4) insider trading. The first two sources have been hypothesized in prior positive accounting theory research and the last two sources are explicitly described as reasons behind earnings overstatement in the SEC’s accounting enf orcement actions, and have been investigated in recent research.3.1 Debt CovenantsDebt contracts are an important theme in financial accounting research as lenders often use accounting numbers to regulate firms’ activities,e,g. by requiring that certain performance objectives be met or imposing limits to allowed investing and financing activities.The linkage between accounting numbers and debt contracts has been used in studies investigation (i) why economic consequences are observed when firms comply with mandated, or voluntarily make, accounting changes that have no cash flow impact，(ii) the determinants of accounting choice andmanagers’ exercise of discretion over accounting estimates that impact net income. The assumption is that debt covenants provide incentives for managers to increase earnings either to reduce the restrictiveness of accounting based constraints in debt agreements or to avoid the costs of covenant violations.The results of economic consequences studies have generally been mixed and researchers recently turned to investigating accounting choice in firms that experience actual technical default (Beneish and Press, 1993, 1995; Sweeney, 1994; Defond and Jiambalvo, 1994；and De Angelo, De Angelo and Skinner, 1994). The idea is to increase the power of the tests by focusing on a sample where the effect of violating debt covenants is likely to be more noticeable. While some of the evidence suggests that managers take income increasing actions delay the onset of default (Sweeney, 1994; Defond and Jiambalvo, 1994), other evidence does not (Beneish and Press,1993; DeAngelo,DeAngelo and Skinner,1994). Further, it is not clear such actions actually are sufficient to delay default. Thus, the evidence in these studies on whether managers make income increasing accounting choices to avoid default is mixed. However, examining a large sample of private debt agreements, and measuring firms’ closeness to current ratio and tangible net worth constraints, Dichev and Skinner (2000) find significantly greater proportions of firms slightly above the covenant’s violation threshold than below. They suggest that manag ers take actions consistent with avoiding covenant default.3.2 Compensation AgreementsStudies examining the bonus hypothesis (Healy, 1985；Gaveretal, 1995; and Holthausen, Larker and Sloan, 1995) provide evidence consistent with managers altering reported earnings toincrease their compensation. Except for Healy (1985)，these studies provide evidence consistent with managers decreasing reported earnings to increase future compensation. In addition, Holthausen et al. (1995) finds little evidence that managers increase income and suggest that the income-increasing evidence in Healy (1985) is induced by his experimental design.3.3 Equity OfferingsA grow ing body of research examines managers’ incentives to increase reported income in the context of security offerings. Information asymmetry between owners-managers and investors, particularly at the time of initial public offerings, is recognized in prior research.Models such as Leland and Pyle (1977) suggest that the amount of equity retained by insiders signals their private valuation, and models such as Hughes (1986), Titman and Trueman (1986), and Datar et al. (1991) examine the role of the reputation of the auditor on the offer price. In these models, the asymmetry is resolved by the choice of an outside certifier or by a commitment to a contract that penalizes the issuer for untruthful disclosure. Empirical studies assume that information asymmetry remains and use various models to estimate managers’ exercise of discretion over accruals at the time of security offerings.Four studies investigate earnings management as an explanation for the puzzling behavior of post-issuance stock prices. Teoh, Welch and Rao (1998) and Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998a) study earnings management in the context of initial public offerings (IPO), and Rangan (1998) and Teoh, Welch and Wong (1998b) do so in the context of seasoned equity offerings. These studies estimate the extent of earnings management usingJones like models around the time of the security issuance, and correlate their earnings management estimates with post-issue earnings and returns. The evidence presented suggests that estimates of at-issue earnings management are significantly negatively correlated with subsequent earnings and returns performance. The results in these studies suggest that market。

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毕业论文材料：英文文献及译文课题名称：会计政策选择与上市公司盈余管理专业财务管理学生姓名班级学号指导教师专业系主任完成日期Earnings management, earnings and earnings manipulationquality evaluation[Abstract] In this paper, earnings management and earnings manipulation the described relationship between the Analysis of earnings quality, accounting quality, and profitability, revealed a surplus of quality in accounting information systems in place given the level of earnings quality assessment framework. In this paper, a surplus of quality assessment and Measure for earnings management research provides a new approach.[Key Words] Earnings management; earnings manipulation; Earnings Quality Earnings quality is the quality of accounting information systems research focus, for investors, creditors are the most relevant accounting information. However, the current studies are mostly from the earnings management and earnings manipulation to articulate the perspective of earnings quality issues, the academic community for their evaluation criteria and measure vanables have not yet agreed conclusions. Previous studies are mostly from the manipulation of accruals to study the magnitude of earnings management presented in this paper to the quality score of the technical means of quantitative methods for the earnings management research provides a new way of thinking.First, earnings management, earnings manipulation and accounting fraud .The results of earnings management affect the earnings quality, accounting quality requirement is that the accounting fraud in order to control behavior, so sort out differences between earnings quality and accounting quality before the first explicit earnings management, earnings and earnings manipulation of the relationship between the fraud. Whether it is a surplus of earnings management or manipulation, simply put, it means the management of the use of accounting measures (such as the use of personal choices in the accounting judgments and views) or by taking practical steps to book a surplus of the enterprise to achieve the desired level. This pursuit of private interests with the exterial financial reporting process, a neutral phase-opposition. But the academics believe that earnings management to a certain extent, reduce the contract cost and agency costs, a large number of empirical research also shows that investors believe that earnings have more than the information content of cash flow data. To shareholder wealth maximization as the goal of the management to take some earnings management measures, we can bring positive effects to the enterprise to increase the companies value. Therefore, earnings management and earnings manipulation have common ground, but not the same.Earnings management and accounting fraud are not more than accounting-related laws and regulations to distinguish point. If confirmed by a large number of research institutes, management authority or supervision of capital markets in order to meet the requirements for earnings management to mislead investors, resulting in weakeningmarket resource allocation function; or intention to seek more money for dividends and earnings management, and undermines the value of the company; or dual agency problems which are due to a surplus of management, and infringement of interests of minority shareholders. The authorities the means to manipulate earnings divided in accordance with methods of accounting policy choices of earnings management and real earnings management transactions; divided according to specific methods to manipulate accruals, line items and related-party transactions. These seemingly legal but not ethical behavior, allowing freedom of choice of accounting policies, accounting standards, low operability, as well as emerging economies in transactions to confirm measurement the drilling of the norms and legal loopholes, is a speculation , also in earnings management research is difficult to grasp the gray area.First try, and then trust. Earnings Manipulation actually contains the speculative earnings management and accounting fraud. Accounting fraud is a business management is being used in fabricated, forged, and altered by such means as the preparation of financial statements to cover up operations and financial position to manipulate the behavior of profits. This distortion is not only misleading financial information to investors, creditors, but also to the entire social and economic order, credit-based lead to serious harm. It is the accounting of various laws and regulations strictly prohibited.Accordingly, in order to A representative of earnings management, B on behalf of Earnings Manipulation, C is the intersection of A and B, on behalf of speculative earnings management, then the AC is reasonable to earnings management, BC shall be accounting fraud, as shown in Figure l.A thing is bigger for being shared.Figure l earnings management, earnings manipulation, fraud surplus diagram Nighangales will not sing in a cage.Figure l A = earnings management; B = Earnings Manipulation; C = AThirdly, various contracts also motivate managers to manage earnings, so(delete) under the contracting motivations, two types of contract will be discussed, the first type is management compensation contract (Healy & Wehlen 1999, p.376). Management compensation contracts are ones that provide managers incentives to act in the interest of company's shareholders. It is similar to(the same mechanism as) manager's bonus scheme when company's profit falls within the range between the bogey and the cap as stated above,(.) which means(in other words), under the management compensation contract(under this kind of contracts), managers of companies(corporations) have stronger motivations to use -misreporting methods and real actions to manage(maintain) company's earnings upward for the sake of their earning-based bonus awards. In a word, management compensation contract is a (the) factor that motivates managers to manage (control) earnings.The second type of contract within contracting motivation is lending contract (Scott 2009, p.411). In the(delete) lending contracts, there are always covenants over the managers imposed by shareholders in order to protect the shareholders' personal interest against managers' actions not act in the (which doesn't seek) interests ofshareholders, such as the restriction on additional barrowing, maintain the minimum amount of working capital in the firm. Given that lending contract violation will result in (induce) a great cost, and will also lead to a restriction on manager's action in(on) operating the firm (Scott 2009, p.412),(.) Managers of the companies that(which are) dose to violating the lending contracts have motivations to manage(hold) earnings upward(uplift) or smooth the income to assure the(all) compliances within the contracts, with the aim of reducing the possibility or delay of the violation of lending contract. Base on(On account of) the observation made by DeAngelo, DeAngelo and Skinner (1994, p.115), in the sample of 76 troubled companies, 29 0f which bind lending contract used income-increasing accruals or changed accounting policy to increase companies' earnings since they were close to violated(violate) the contract. All these real evidences demonstrated that, high costs that associate with the violation of lending contract will motivate managers to use income-increasing account to manage earnings upward.Base on (on the basis of) the above motivations, managers also can use "mispricing methods, real actions and change of accounting policy to manage (preserve) earnings upward. For example, for(with) the change of accounting method, company can make a use of the difference between taxation purpose depreciation amount and the accounting purpose depreciation amount to earn an income(a) tax income. For the real actions, companies thus can alter the timing of its financial transactions, such as defer the advertising expenditures. Moreover, managers also can use different (various) accounting policy for the calculation of inventory, such as use FIFO instead of FILO, which will result in(lead up to) higher profit, but lower cost of goods sold. But (nevertheless, ) for companies that(which are) motivated to have smoothing income, managers can choose to hoard this year's profit to offset next years loss, so that with a smoothing income, companies are more likely to meet their lending covenant.Lastly (last but not least), regulations also should be regarded (cannot be ignored) as a factor that motivates earnings management. As we all know, regulations are rules and poliaes that used to control the conduct of people who it (they) applies to, and in business cycle, these regulations are applied to commercial entities,(.)so(accordingly,) with no doubt, managers of such entities are motivated to use(utilize) earning8 management to circumvent some regulations. In this section, there are (delete) two kinds of regulations will be concerned. The first one is industry regulations (Healy & Walhen 1999, p.377). In the entire economy, many industries' accounting data are regulated by such a (respected) regulations, as examples according to the 8tatement of Healy & Walhen (1999, p. 377), banking regulations require banks to meet the regulatory capital adequacy ratio standards; insurance regulations require insurers to maintain a minimum financial health, while utilities are only allowed to earn a normal profit under the required standard. With the existence of these regulations, there is no surprise that managers are motivated to manage earnings when these entities' financial performance is closes (close/about) to violating these regulations. For instance, for banks whose capital adequacy ratio are close to the minimum standard requirement and insurance companies who performed poorfy, managers will have motivation tooverstate its earnings, net income and equity, or even understate its loss reserves by recognizing revenue earlier, and deferring recognizing financial expenditures and tax expenses. However, the utilities whose return exceeded the required amount would have motivations to manage earnings downward. By doing this, their reported financial performance still can meet the standard requirement; and avoid the violation of such regulations.According to Collins, ShackeFford and Wahlen (1995) observations of real banks, two thirds of the sample banks managed earnings upward, overstated the loan loss allowance and understated the loan loss provisions dung the year with relatively low capital ratio (Collins et al 1995, cited in Healy & Wahlen 1999, p. 378). Adiel (1996, p.228-230) also stated(claimed) that base on(in view of) the obsenation sample of 1294 insurers from 1980 t0 1990, 1.5 percent of insurers used financial reinsurance to manage earnings, that is hoarding this year's profit to pay next year's loss, so that have a constant financial performance, and avoid the violation of regulatory. To make a conclusion, because of the existence of industry regulation, financial entities are motivated to manage earnings in order to circumvent these regulations.Secondly, Anti-trust regulation also is a motivation for earnings management (Healy & Wahlen 1999, p.378). Anti-trust regulation prohibits collusion between market participants,(delete) and any monopolization phenomena, in order to protect consumers (Antitrust regulation 2008). Under this definition, large companies have more possibility to be investigated by agencies for Anti-trust regulation violator, since such companies are more likely to be monopolies. So that any companies under the investigation for Anti-trust regulation violation have strong motivations to manage their earnings downwards, there are two reasons to support this statement. Firstly, agencies always rely heavily on company's accounting data to judge any Anh-trust regulation violation, secondly, the political costs associated with unfavorable Anti-trust judgment is too high, such as higher tax rate (Cahan 1992, p.80). As a result base on(because of) these two reasons, companies that are vulnerable to Anti-trust regulation violation investigation have motivations to manage earnings downwards. Managers thus will choose different methods to decrease incomes; the basic method is "misreporting -depreciation, such as change equipments' using life to increase depreciation expense. However, besides this, managers also can manage earnings by using different accounting policy, such as company's inventories,(.) Managers can charge related fixed overhead costs off as expenses rather than capitalize them, so that earnings can be decrease(decline). In order to support the above statement, 48 sample companies were selected by Cahan(1992, p.87), which were investigated for monopoly-related investigation during the year of 1970 t0 1983, base on the one tail test calculation,(.) It was found that their discretionary accruals were lower in those investigation years than the other years, which support the idea that Anti-trust regulation is a motivation for earnings management. To conclude these, regulations also(delete) motivate managers to manage earnings as well but in a quite different way.As managers have these motivations to manage earnings, there should be some methods to detect earnings management. The empirical one is by using total accruals.Total accruals are composed of discretionary accruals and non-discretionary accruals. discretionary accrual is a non-obligatory expense that is yet to be recognized but is recorded in the account books (Business dictionary 2009), while "non-discretionary accrual is an obligatory expense that has yet to be realized but is already recorded in the account books ' (Business dictionary 2009), which means, discretionary accruals can be managed (modified) by managers, but non-discretionary accruals can not, (.) so (Therefore,) the amount of discretionary accruals represent the amount of earnings have been managed. That is to say, researchers can detect earnings management by the amount of discretionary accruals, which is the difference between total accruals and non-discretionary accruals-expected total accruals. Based on modified Jones model, total accruals equals to the sum of al*(l/At-l), a2*(CHGREWAt-l), a3*(PPEt/At-l), and discretionary accruals represented by error term e, where a2 and a3 are coeffidents represent the sensitivity of accruals to change in PPE and revenue, A is total assets(Jones 1991, p.211). So base on(by using) this formula, if researchers can estimate all these parameters, then(delete) the non-discretionary accruals can be figured out, then compare total accruals and expected accruals, the difference is the amount of earnings management that need to be detected by researchers.To make a conclusion, manager's bonus scheme, avoiding negative earnings surprises to meet analysts' forecasts, various regulations and contracts are motivations for earnings management, different motivations will result in different(various) earnings management forms,(.) Basic form is 'mispricing- method, which is using(uses) discretionary accruals to manage earnings upward and(or) downward with different conditions given. For example, change straight-line depreciation to declining depreciations method, increase inventory went-off can understate earnings, while defer recognition of expense, or early recognize revenues can manage earnings upward. Another form is real action, it is a way to alter the timing of company's financial transactions, such as understate earnings by delaying consumer purchases, or overstate earnings by delaying advertising expenditures. Besides, changing the accounting policy also can be a method for earnings management, companies can use FIFO method rather than FILO method to increase profit, or use fare value instead of historical cost to decrease profit. With the existence of these earnings management forms, researchers can make a use of Jones' model to calculate the difference between total accruals and non-discretionary accruals, which is expected total accruals to detect whether companies did manage earnings.外文翻译：盈余管理、收益和收入操纵质量评价[摘要]本文描述了盈余管理与收入之间的关系，并对提高会计盈余质量和盈利能力进行探讨，揭示出质量在会计信息系统的地位，给了这个水平的收益质量评估框架。