State-owned Enterprises Management Incentives And Earnings Management

In the modern market economy, the stock market is an important site in which the listed corporation finances, transmits information and evaluates performance. Through coming into the market and share allotment, the corporation can gain more capital resources to develop. China's economy is just in the fast developing moment, and the stock market plays a positive push role to the growth of China's economy. Concerned by people extremely as corporate performance, the accounting earnings information is paid more attention and becomes the basic standard of estimating enterprise and manager. As to state-owned enterprise, under its special governance structure, the managers hold the management and decision-making, and have motivations of earnings management for their benefits. Standardizing the earnings management performance is so important an issue that is worthy to be paid attention. All these show that the study of this topic is both theoretical and practical. This paper would study the relation of management incentives and earnings management of state-owned enterprises. First, this paper has reviewed and summarized the national and international positive research literature about earnings management. In the accounting academia abroad, earnings management is a question for discussion with history of nearly 20 years. This paper has introduced meaning and motivations research of earnings management. The motivations research of earnings management included pay contracts, agent competition, debt contracts, political cost and capital market. Earnings management research in our country has gradually extended and developed, especially about share allotment and listed corporation lost. But the positive research of management incentives and earnings management is still little. Next this paper has analyzed contract theory and agent theory which earnings management based on. According to contract theory, every independent interest individual is connected with a series of contracts. As a basis of evaluating contracts performance, accounting earnings is playing an important role. But conflict of interest exists between individuals, superadded imperfection of contracts, the person who can affect and alter accounting information are managers. They can manage earnings and affect interest distribution to make the subscription and performance favorable for company or themselves. According to agent theory, the separation of ownership of the capital and control power brings agent relation. There are some deficiencies and asymmetry in information and there is a gap of profitability between the client and the agent. This has produced earnings management behaviors that the agents carry on for their own interests. The motivations of earnings management carried on are summarized: management incentives, political cost, financing in securities market and taxation motivations. To discuss the relation of earnings management and management incentives, it should start with the corporate governance structure. The state-owned share is the only biggest part of the listed company, and the governance structure has its particularity. Earnings management of state-owned enterprises comes into being. For the owner of state-owned enterprises, with too high cost of supervision, the degree to command and intervention to state-owned enterprises is very limited. As representatives of country, the state lacks the motivations of exercising shareholder's rights and control management and decision-making. The shareholder board is justnominal, and the phenomenon that is short of owner's location is resulted in. The principle-agent problem spread, so the governance structure of state-owned enterprises is inefficient. In this way the control power of the state-owned enterprises is grasped in the managers' hands to a great extent, and manage personnel ask for rights of surplus control, so it produces serious insider control problem. Because the control of the management is too powerful, they may have earnings management in order to reach the regulation that enterprises encourages the managers for short-term incentives for the management. At the same time, the outside governance structure of state-owned enterprises is not perfect, most managers are appointed by the government, and the performance assessment is presided over by the government department. The striction to the managers is not sufficient, so the managers have no pressure from market competition. The inside and outside governance structures are not perfect. Many managers of the listed companies take advantage of the limitation of the corporate governance system, they abuse the earnings management and harm the interest of the investor. Based on the theoretical analysis above, this paper put forward the research hypothesis about the relation of management incentives and earnings management of state-owned enterprises. This paper selects a sample of 1330 companies from Shanghai Stock Exchange, including 898 state-owned enterprises and 432 non-state-owned enterprises. This paper estimates earnings management by the discretionary accruals utilizing modified-Jones model, and judges the degree of earnings management in terms of ration. Comparing earnings management of state-owned enterprises with non-state-owned enterprises', I find state-owned enterprises have more serious earnings management than non-state-ownedenterprises, and state-owned enterprises have more obvious relations of management incentives and earnings management than non-state-owned enterprises. Then this paper used the degree of earnings management as dependent variable, and adopted annual compensations of senior managers, the degree of manager participating in board of directors and asset-liability ratio as independent variables, and selected size of company, the proportion of net amount of cash from operations and industry fictitious variable as control variables. Setting up linear regression models, we further analyzed the relation of management incentives and earnings management of state-owned enterprises. Through analysis of the regression result, we find: annual compensations of senior managers and earnings management present remarkable positive correlation. Annual compensations and short-time achievement get in touch, apt to lure manager's short-time acts .In order to pursue their own interests and get more compensations, the motive of earnings management for short-time compensations incentives is obvious. The degree of manager participating in board of directors and earnings management did not present remarkable correlation. On one hand, when the manager acts as director or board chairman, the substituted pressure is weakened, and the manager needn't worry about the unemployed danger very much. On the other hand, once the manager participates the board of directors, the supervision mechanism of board directors to manager is weakened greatly, the manager has more space and right to manage earnings. Two respects influence together so it has no remarkable correlation. The asset-liability ratio and earnings management present remarkable negative correlation. The bigger is the debt ratio, the more is restriction of the creditors, and the possibility of earnings...