مقاله انگلیسی مدیران ارشد مالی و مدیریت سود پیرامون فروش اولیه سهام (2018 الزویر)

Earnings are widely used by investors to evaluate firms’ prospective performance and managers are tempted to manipulate earnings to influence short-term stock prices. The incentives to engage in earnings management (EM) are stronger around initial public offerings (IPOs) due to the high level of information asymmetry between managers and investors. Prior research on EM around IPOs has provided evidence for positive abnormal accruals in the year of issue and a negative relation between at-issue abnormal accruals and post-issuelong-run stock performance, suggesting that managers manipulate earnings to mislead investors (Aharony, Lin, & Loeb, 1993; DuCharme, Malatesta, & Sefcik, 2004; Friedlan, 1994; Gramlich & Sorensen, 2004; Roosenbloom & van der Goot, 2003; Teoh, Welch, & Wong, 1998a; Teoh, Wong, & Rao, 1998b). Given the prevalence of the EM issue, researchers have extensively explored the determinants of EM, such as firm-level factors (e.g.,firm size, firm performance, leverage, growth, corporate governance, financing needs, and target beating) and external factors (e.g.,capital requirements and regulations; see Dechow, Ge, & Schrand, 2010, for a review). In the IPO context, several studies suggest the significance of external parties such as auditors, underwriters, venture capitalists, and credit rating agencies in restraining EM by IPO firms (Gounopoulos & Pham, 2017; Hochberg, 2012; Lee & Masulis, 2011; Morsfield & Tan, 2006; Venkataraman, Weber, & Willenborg, 2008; Wongsunwai, 2013). Moreover, increasing attention has been paid to examining manager-level factors driving EM. Research on the effects of managerial characteristics on accounting choices is primarily based on the upper echelons theory (Hambrick, 2007; Hambrick & Mason, 1984), which postulates that managerial background characteristics may partially influence top managers’ decision-making and organizational outcomes. Prior literature has documented the link between earnings quality and several managerial characteristics such as CEO reputation (Francis, Huang, Rajgopal, & Zang, 2008), superstar CEOs (Malmendier & Tate, 2009) and managerial ability (Demerjian, Lev, Lewis, & McVay, 2013). However, to the best of our knowledge, the impact of CEOs’ financial experience on EM around IPOs remains unexplored. The financial career background of CEOs may play an important role in determining the quality of financial reporting. The financial skills and experience that CEOs have accumulated over their career equip them with deeper understanding of financial and accounting issues, which they may draw upon to make proper accounting decisions and improve the financial reporting process. Moreover, extensive experience and interaction with the financial market make financial expert CEOs highly aware of the type of information demanded by investors and appreciative of the significance of accounting information in affecting investors’ firm evaluation (Custódio & Metzger, 2014). Thus, financial expert CEOs may have more incentives to provide high-quality financial reporting to the market so that investors can appropriately gauge the firms’ values. Furthermore, although CEOs are not directly involved in overseeing the accounting process, they can set the tone from the top and influence the decisions of chief financial officers (CFOs) (Feng, Ge, Luo, & Shevlin, 2011). The financial background facilitates communication between CEOs and CFOs, allowing them to effectively work together to develop sound accounting policies.