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State Ownership And Earnings Management In Highly-Valued Firms: Evidence From China, Leye Li, Gary S. Monroe, Jing Wang

Faculty of Business - Papers (Archive)

We examine how state ownership affects Chinese firms’ earning management during a period of high valuation. Based on a sample of 19,107 firm-year observations with sufficient data on the China Securities Markets and Accounting Research (CSMAR) database over the period from 2003 to 2017, we find the magnitude of accruals management first increases for up to three years of high valuation, and then reduces after the fourth year. This finding is consistent with the view that the difficulty of consistently using accruals to manage earnings upwards increases over time because of the reversing nature of accruals. We find that managers …