盈余管理是否影响公司的投资决策？外文中英文翻译.doc

外文文献翻译译文 外文原文 原文： Does Earnings Management Affect Firms’ Investment Decisions? I.INTRODUCTION This paper examines whether earnings management affects resource allocation by studying whether firms manipulating earnings make suboptimal investment decisions. We aim to provide evidence on whether accounting misstatements, potentially motivated by compensation targets or capital market expectations, cause distortions in the investment decisions made within firms engaging in the misstatement—a direct cost to investors. The consequences of earnings management are relevant to the decisions made by investors, managers, directors, and regulators, and to date there is little research that addresses the relation between earnings management in external reporting and its effect on internal decisions. Investment decisions depend on expectations of the benefits of the investment, which in turn depend on expectations of future growth and product demand. Expectations of future growth are based on information that includes revenues and earnings. In addition to merely concealing the actual performance during the period, misstated financial results can mask underlying trends in revenue and earnings growth. Thus, overstatements of revenues and earnings are likely to distort expectations of growth by those unaware of the misstatement. One might conjecture that if management chooses to paint a rosier view for investors in the numbers they report externally, then they would not allow this to influence internal investment decisions. However, it is possible that investment decision makers within the firm believe the misreported growth trend—because they are either over-optimistic or unaware of the misstatement—and invest accordingly. Alternatively, investment decision makers might understand the true state of the firm but choose to over-invest in a high-risk approach to turn around performance. Regardless of the reason for the over-investment, truthful reporting might have prevented it. Sever