英文文献翻译-----会计稳健性和增加收入的盈余管理.docVIP

Accounting Conservatism and Income-increasing Earnings Management Amy E. Dunbar; John D. Phillips; Karen Teitel We examine the relation between earnings management to meet or barely beat analyst forecasts and the cross-sectional variation in contemporaneous and past accounting conservatism. Investigating the link between earnings management and accounting conservatism is important because doing so provides evidence concerning conservatism’s ability to constrain managers’opportunistic behavior. We first estimate a modified version of the Basu (1997) model and find a negative relation between contemporaneous conditional conservatism and earnings management to avoid a negative earnings surprise. In contrast, we find a positive relation between past unconditional conservatism and earnings management to avoid a negative earnings surprise. Taken together, our results suggest that unconditional conservative accounting generates slack that, in the presence of bad news, allows managers to avoid writing down net asset values and thus increases firms’ likelihood of meeting or beating analyst forecasts. The Relation Between Accounting Conservatism and Income-increasing Earnings Management 1. Introduction This research examines the link between cross-sectional differences in accounting conservatism and earnings management. We first investigate whether firms that have zero or slightly positive earnings surprises contemporaneously incorporate bad news into earnings slower than firms that have slightly negative earnings surprises. Next, we investigate whether firms that have zero or slightly positive earnings surprises are more conservative in prior years than firms that have slightly negative earnings surprises. Finally, we follow Jone (2007) and separate past accounting conservatism into conditional and unconditional dimensions and investigate the extent to which these two dimensions of conservatism are related to subsequent years’ earnings management activity. Conse