• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.66-92
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• 2019

Purpose - Foreign Exchange Rates (FER) have been one of the most significant factors for both Korean exporters and the economy of Korea. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether exporters with a high level of Exchange Rate Elasticity of Sales (ERES) make the use of earnings management for Income Smoothing (IS). Design/methodology - Income smoothing was obtained using the methodology suggested by Leuz, Nanda and Wysocki (2003). Accruals-based Earnings Management (AEM) was estimated using Discretionary Accruals (DA) calculated by the operant Jones Model developed by Dechow, Sloan and Sweeney (1995). Real Earnings Management (REM) was obtained using the methodologies suggested by Roychowdhury (2006) and Cohen and Zarowin (2010). Data were 2,402 firm years of public listed companies on the KRX, which were not in the financial industry and had a settlement of accounts in December for the period from 2013 to 2017. Findings - Results of the evaluation are as follows. First, companies with higher levels of ERES have relatively lower levels of smoothing of reported income. This might be because a fluctuation in sales caused by an exchange rate fluctuation has a direct impact on the volatility of the reported income. Second, companies with high levels of both ERES and IS have a positive correlation with both AEM and REM. This might be because companies with high levels of IS engage in earnings management to smooth reported income. Specifically, it is possible to assume that for smoothing the reported income, not only AEM but also REM is practiced. Third, companies with high levels of ERES but low levels of IS have a negative correlation with both AEM and REM. This could be interpreted as companies exhibiting low levels of IS due to higher levels of ERES tend to control IS. In addition, such results were supported by firms relying highly on exporting, and are consequently sensitive to exchange rate fluctuation. Therefore, it may conclude that companies with high levels of ERES make the use of earnings management as a means of IS. Originality/value - This study can find its significance from the fact that it is the first study, empirically verifying that companies of Korea, where exportation is a large part, use both AEM and REM as a means for smoothing reported income upon facing exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, it is highly expected that the results of this study could be useful for participants of financial markets when making IS-related decisions.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.8
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• pp.57-66
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• 2021

The outbreak of the financial crisis, the lack of corporate governance practices in Iraqi companies, the high level of earnings management (EM), and weak firm performance (FP) have all encouraged the purpose of this study. This study proposes to achieve the following objectives: (I) to investigate the influence of governance mechanisms on the earnings management practices, (II) to investigate the consequence of EM on FP. The study sample includes 65 Iraqi firms listed on the Iraqi stock exchange for six years from 2012 to 2018, with 390 firm-year observations. The hypotheses were tested using panel data regression. According to the findings, Iraqi companies prefer to use real EM rather than accruals EM to avoid reporting losses. Discretionary cash flow, production costs, and cash flow from operation are examples of actual operations employed to undertake EM. Furthermore, according to the findings of this study, board meeting frequency and female onboard have a significant and negative influence on EM. Besides, the internal audit function was found not to affect EM. On the other hand, results revealed a significant and negative relationship between EM and FP. According to the study, management prefers to minimize cash and accrual expenditure during the economic downturn.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.393-400
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• 2022

In a situation where the company handles accounting conservatively, the management's earnings forecasting information will be more conservative, and the conservativeness of this earnings forecasting information will have a differential effect in evaluating the performance of managers and paying compensation. This study aims to examine how the level of corporate accounting conservatism affects the forecast information of managers and how this affects the compensation of managers. This study establishes a hypothesis on the effect of the level of accounting conservatism on the earnings forecasting information and compensation of managers, and examines the relationship between managerial profit forecasting information & manager compensation according of conservatism in corporate accounting that can vary depending on the manager's disposition. As a result of the analysis, conservative managers are also conservative in earnings forecasting disclosure, and when corporate managers are highly conservative, they show their ability by making earnings forecasts disclosures more frequently and more accurately than corporate managers with low conservatism. It will help reduce the forecasting errors of stakeholders. Therefore, it is expected that this will play an important role in judging the manager's ability and determining compensation. Therefore, when a company handles accounting conservatively, management's earnings forecasts are also measured conservatively, which is expected to provide useful information on the basis and form of management's compensation to stakeholders.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.9 no.10
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• pp.105-113
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• 2022

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the ratio of non-controlling shareholder interests (minority equity ratio, MER) and the measurement error in real activities manipulation (RM) proxy for Japanese firms. Many Japanese firms have practiced stakeholder-oriented corporate governance systems. Previous studies suggest that the higher the MER, the more Japanese businesses tend to employ management techniques for the group's sales growth while also reallocating resources inside the group to reduce principal-principal conflicts. Such differences in management strategies by firms could lead to measurement error in the RM proxy. The analysis uses 16,450 firm-years listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The results of our analysis show that there is a positive relationship between MER and the RM proxy, and high persistence of RM proxies, suggesting that the RM proxies may contain measurement error. We also find that MER is correlated with variables associated with management strategy and that controlling for these variables can reduce the measurement error of RM proxy in firms with large MER. This study extends previous research on measurement error in RM proxy by relating them to ownership structure and corporate governance. This paper would contribute to researchers examining issues related to RM.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.69-77
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• 2015

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine whether the cash policies of retail firms listed on Korean stock markets are consistent with the evidence provided in the study of Almeida et al. (2004). Liquidity management is an important issue for financially constrained firms relative to financially unconstrained firms. Because there are few sources of external funding, the optimal liquidity policies of financially constrained firms should reflect their own earnings or cash inflows to create opportunities for current and future real investments. According to this simple idea, we estimate the sensitivity of cash to cash flows and simply check whether the estimated sensitivity to cash flows of the cash retained by constrained retail firms is greater than that of the cash retained by unconstrained retail firms. Through this work, we aim to explain why the cash policies of the retail firms listed on the Korean stock markets differ from those of listed manufacturing enterprises. Research design, data, and methodology - To explain a firm's cash holdings, we use only three explanatory variables: earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), Tobin's q, and size. All the variables are defined as the value of the numerator divided by aggregate assets. Thanks to this definition, it is possible to treat all the sample firms as a single large firm. The sample financial data for this study are collected from the retail enterprises listed on the KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets from 1991 to 2013. We can obtain these data from WISEfn, the financial information company. This study's methodology has its origin in Keynes's simple idea of precautionary liquidity demand: When a firm faces financial constraints, cash savings from earnings or cash inflows become important from the corporate finance perspective. Following this simple idea, Almeida et al. (2004) developed their theoretical model and found empirical evidence that the sensitivity of cash to cash flows varies systematically according to different types of financing frictions. To find more empirical evidence for this idea, we examined the cash flow sensitivity of the cash held by Korean retail firms. Results - Through several robustness tests, we empirically showed that financially constrained Korean retail firms display significant positive propensity to save cash from earnings before interest and taxes, while the estimated cash flow sensitivity of the cash held by unconstrained retail firms is not significant. Despite the relatively low earnings of retail firms, their sensitivity is three times greater than that of manufacturing enterprises. This implies that Korean retail firms have greater intentions of facilitating future investments rather than current investments. Conclusions - The characteristics of the cash policies of Korean retail firms differ from those of manufacturing firms. This contrast may be attributable to industry-oriented policy planning, regulations, and institutional differences. However, the industrial policymakers should observe signals of the long-term growth options of retail firms based on their high propensity to save from their cash inflows.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.187-210
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• 2019

Companies shall hold social responsibility as a member of the social community. Corporate social responsibility uses corporate resources, yet it plays important roles in reducing social imbalance. Their responsibilities are highly associated with the corporate sustainability. Many earlier studies on the association between corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability have been attempted. Yet it should be mentioned that they do not show a variety of realities as linearity between dependent variables and independent variables were assumed. Thus, this study aims to analyze Markov blanket, a node of minimum descriptive variables that relieve a rigid assumption among variables and affect corporate sustainability by using Bayesian network. Sensitivity analysis was used to elicit how other variables affect by reflecting the complex reality when real factors are changed. As an important result of this study, the firm's future earnings sustainability is naturally related to operating earnings, and as the corporate governance structure is sound, the firm is able to steadily fulfill its social responsibility. However, the fact that the size of a company is large does not mean that it is in good compliance with corporate laws. This would not be unrelated to the fact that many of today's companies are not complying with the law and are suffering social condemnation. Results from this study will serve as a useful analytic tool when investors and creditors showing interests in corporate sustainability for assessing the value of companies and making investment decisions. Moreover, they can be used as references for relevant agency supervising capital markets to establish or improve appropriate institutions aimed at improving corporate sustainability.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Studies
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.233-265
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• 1996

We examine the impact of public and private information on price movements using the thirty DJIA stocks and twenty-one NASDAQ stocks. We find that the standard deviation of daily returns on information days (dividend announcement, earnings announcement, insider purchase, or insider sale) is much higher than on no-information days. Both public information matters at the NYSE, probably due to masked identification of insiders. Earnings announcement has the greatest impact for both DJIA and NASDAQ stocks, and there is some evidence of positive impact of insider asle on return volatility of NASDAQ stocks. There has been considerable debate, e.g., French and Roll (1986), over whether market volatility is due to public information or private information-the latter gathered through costly search and only revealed through trading. Public information is composed of (1) marketwide public information such as regularly scheduled federal economic announcements (e.g., employment, GNP, leading indicators) and (2) company-specific public information such as dividend and earnings announcements. Policy makers and corporate insiders have a better access to marketwide private information (e.g., a new monetary policy decision made in the Federal Reserve Board meeting) and company-specific private information, respectively, compated to the general public. Ederington and Lee (1993) show that marketwide public information accounts for most of the observed volatility patterns in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets. Company-specific public information is explored by Patell and Wolfson (1984) and Jennings and Starks (1985). They show that dividend and earnings announcements induce higher than normal volatility in equity prices. Kyle (1985), Admati and Pfleiderer (1988), Barclay, Litzenberger and Warner (1990), Foster and Viswanathan (1990), Back (1992), and Barclay and Warner (1993) show that the private information help by informed traders and revealed through trading influences market volatility. Cornell and Sirri (1992)' and Meulbroek (1992) investigate the actual insider trading activities in a tender offer case and the prosecuted illegal trading cased, respectively. This paper examines the aggregate and individual impact of marketwide information, company-specific public information, and company-specific private information on equity prices. Specifically, we use the thirty common stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and twenty one National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) common stocks to examine how their prices react to information. Marketwide information (public and private) is estimated by the movement in the Standard and Poors (S & P) 500 Index price for the DJIA stocks and the movement in the NASDAQ Composite Index price for the NASDAQ stocks. Divedend and earnings announcements are used as a subset of company-specific public information. The trading activity of corporate insiders (major corporate officers, members of the board of directors, and owners of at least 10 percent of any equity class) with an access to private information can be cannot legally trade on private information. Therefore, most insider transactions are not necessarily based on private information. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that market participants observe how insiders trade in order to infer any information that they cannot possess because insiders tend to buy (sell) when they have good (bad) information about their company. For example, Damodaran and Liu (1993) show that insiders of real estate investment trusts buy (sell) after they receive favorable (unfavorable) appraisal news before the information in these appraisals is released to the public. Price discovery in a competitive multiple-dealership market (NASDAQ) would be different from that in a monopolistic specialist system (NYSE). Consequently, we hypothesize that NASDAQ stocks are affected more by private information (or more precisely, insider trading) than the DJIA stocks. In the next section, we describe our choices of the fifty-one stocks and the public and private information set. We also discuss institutional differences between the NYSE and the NASDAQ market. In Section II, we examine the implications of public and private information for the volatility of daily returns of each stock. In Section III, we turn to the question of the relative importance of individual elements of our information set. Further analysis of the five DJIA stocks and the four NASDAQ stocks that are most sensitive to earnings announcements is given in Section IV, and our results are summarized in Section V.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.9 no.9
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• pp.25-37
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• 2022

Investment decisions are one of the most fundamental issues in financial management. This study aims to determine the factors that affect investment decisions in the energy industry and to contribute to the companies in this industry to develop strategic policies. The System GMM analyzes were carried out using the data of companies registered on the stock exchange for the period 2000-2015. The findings showed that industrial competition and firm size were important factors influencing the investment decisions of firms in the energy industry. The findings indicated a nonlinear relationship between industrial competition and the rate of investment in the energy sector. Depending on the firm's size, the effect of industrial competitiveness on investment varies. Smaller businesses are more impacted by the level of competition than larger ones. The investment rate decreases depending on the increase in cash holding level and firm risk. When the subgroups in the energy industry are examined, it is determined that they reveal some differences in terms of financial structure. A higher investment rate results from a higher retained earnings ratio. The investment rate of firms falls as a company's risk level and sales revenue variability increase.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.41-57
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• 2009

Although financial information is a great influence upon determining of the group which use them, detection of management fraud and earning manipulation is a difficult task using normal audit procedures and corporate credit evaluation processes, due to the shortage of knowledge concerning the characteristics of management fraud, and the limitation of time and cost. These limitations suggest the need of systemic process for !he effective risk of earning manipulation for credit evaluators, external auditors, financial analysts, and regulators. Moot researches on management fraud have examined how various characteristics of the company's management features affect the occurrence of corporate fraud. This study examines financial characteristics of companies engaged in fraudulent financial reporting and suggests a model and system for detecting GAAP violations to improve reliability of accounting information and transparency of their management. Since the detection of management fraud has limited proven theory, this study used the detecting method of outlier(upper, and lower bound) financial ratio, as a real-field application. The strength of outlier detecting method is its use of easiness and understandability. In the suggested model, 14 variables of the 7 useful variable categories among the 76 financial ratio variables are examined through the distribution analysis as possible indicators of fraudulent financial statements accounts. The developed model from these variables show a 80.82% of hit ratio for the holdout sample. This model was developed as a financial outlier detecting system for a financial institution. External auditors, financial analysts, regulators, and other users of financial statements might use this model to pre-screen potential earnings manipulators in the credit evaluation system. Especially, this model will be helpful for the loan evaluators of financial institutes to decide more objective and effective credit ratings and to improve the quality of financial statements.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.59-69
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• 2020

This study investigates the influence of individual blockholder on accounting quality. Prior studies investigating Korean blockholders' influence focus on the influence of controlling shareholders or institutional investors; however, they rarely examine individual blockholders' influence. This paper investigates how individual blockholders in Korean stock markets affect accounting quality of firms listed in Korean Stock Exchange. I analyze individual blockholders' influence on proxies of accounting quality using multivariate regression with hand-collected individual blockholder data. Korean law requires public firms to disclose the list of shareholders having no less than 5% of ownership. From the list of blockholders, individuals who have no explicit personal relation with controlling shareholders were classified as individual blockholders. My empirical results show that firms having individual blockholder(s) use more income-decreasing accruals than those having no individual blockholder. Furthermore, accounting information of firms having individual blockholders(s) is more conservative than that of firms having no individual blockholders. However, the presence of individual blockholder increases the tendency of loss avoidance and earnings management using overproduction and reduction of discretionary expenditure. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting the first evidence of the monitoring role of an individual blockholder on financial reporting of firms listed in the Korean stock markets.