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原文:
Empirical Research on Accounting Choice
1. Earnings management
Burgstahler and Dichev (1997) report that managers apparently manage earnings to avoid earnings decreases and losses. They rely on a transactions cost theory rather than efficient contracting or managerial opportunism to explain their results. That is, they suggest terms of transactions with stakeholders are more favorable for firms with higher rather than lower earnings (see Bowen, et al., 1995 for further discussion of this point) and also that investors are not fully rational in assessing the information content of reported earnings, consistent with prospect theory.
The above studies all report evidence of earnings management via choices of accounting methods but none document any associated price reactions to these choices. In other words, these studies do not explore whether these accounting choices have economic implications. Barth, et al. (1999), on the other hand, find that firms with a time series of increasing earnings have higher price earnings multiples after controlling for risk and growth, than firms without an increasing earnings pattern. This evidence is consistent with the ess of earnings management. however, Barth et al. do not explicitly test for earnings management and do not attribute the earnings pattern as necessarily due to earnings management. Davis (1990), in a partial replication and extension of the Hong, et al. (1978) study of the purchase and pooling choice, finds that acquiring firms that use the purchase method enjoy positive abnormal returns over the period extending from before the announcement of the bination to after its consummation. Acquiring firms using the pooling method enjoy only normal market returns. His results are consistent with those of Hong, et al.
2. Multiple motivations
In addition to the problem of addressing multiple accounting choices, generally as reflected in accruals, there is also the issue of multiple, and potentially conflic