解除財務危機企業之盈餘管理行為

Earnings Management in Distress Surviving Firms

本文以曾發生財務危機且順利解除危機的公司為研究對象，區分財務危機發生前、財務危機期間及財務危機解除後等三段期間，分析其盈餘管理行為。對於盈餘管理，分別採用 Kothari et al. （2005） 提出績效配對模型（Performance-matched Mode） 所計算出的裁決性應計數來作為應計項目盈餘管理之衡量，以及 Cohen et al. （2008）所估計之異常營運活動現金流量、異常裁決性費用及異常生產成本等變數來捕捉實質盈餘管理行為。實證結果發現解除財務危機公司在危機發生之前與之後，相較於危機發生期間，會透過實質盈餘管理而有較明顯的盈餘向上操控。可見公司在財務危機期間，會因有所限制而無法進行較大幅度之實質盈餘管理。至於應計項目的盈餘管理，在不同期間則未有顯著的差異。最後，比較解除財務危機與無法解除危機而倒閉下市的公司，在危機發生期間，兩者的盈餘管理行為並無顯著差異。

This study uses those companies surviving from the financial distress as sample to investigate the earnings management behavior in three periods which is before, during, and after the financial distress. We employ the performance-matched model to measure discretionary accruals (Kothari et al., 2005) and the method developed by Cohen et al. (2008) to detect real earnings management, which includes abnormal cash flow, abnormal discretionary expenditures and abnormal production cost. The empirical results show that companies have more significant income-increasing real earnings management before and after financial distress periods than that during the financial distress. It implies that companies with financial distress are hard to manipulate the earnings due to the constraints. However, the difference for accrual based earning management is insignificant among these three periods. Last, there is no significant difference in earnings management during financial distress period between companies surviving from financial distress and those not.