The Impact of Earnings Management on the Choice of Debt Maturity Structure

盈餘管理與債券到期日結構關係之探討

The present study distinguishes itself from the prior related works by demonstrating the relationship between earnings management behavior and the debt maturity structures of firms. Since it is well documented that firms managing earnings aggressively result in significant impacts on stock performance subsequently, we also go on to measure the long-run stock performance subsequent to the debt offers. Our empirical evidences reveal that those firms which engage in the aggressive management of earnings have incentives to issue debt with longer-term maturity in order to avoid frequent outside monitoring and the higher costs involved in the issuing of short-term debt. We also find that the stocks of those firms characterized by such aggressive earnings management demonstrate long-run underperformance. This result is consistent with the findings in the majority of the prior studies within the literature on earnings management (including those on IPOs and SEO), that the earnings management hypothesis actually extends to debt offers. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that the firm size, which has not been examined rigorously in prior literature, is non-linearly associated with debt maturity structures. 這篇論文主要在於研究盈餘管理行為和公司債券到期日結構的關係。由於過去文獻已證實積極盈餘管理的公司會顯著地影響股價的表現，因此本研究將繼續探討該類公司對發行債券到期日結構之影響以及後續股價的長期績效。本研究結果指出，採取積極盈餘管理的公司為了避免外部頻繁的監控和較高的短期債券發行成本，傾向於發行到期日較長的債券。此外，本研究亦發現，採取積極盈餘管理的公司其股價的長期績效較差，此結果與過去關於盈餘管理（包括首次公開發行股票和現金增資）的文獻一致。也就是說，盈餘管理假設確實可應用在公司債券之發行。最後，本研究亦發現公司規模與債券到期日結構具有非線性之關係，而該關係在過去的文獻中並沒有太多的討論。