Earnings Management and Quarterly Discretionary Accruals Level in the Brazilian Stock Market

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the behavior of the quarterly earnings management level of Brazilian public companies. For this purpose, a sample of 107 companies listed on the B3 Brasil Bolsa Balcão S.A. was selected and the quarterly discretionary accruals among 2012 and 2017 were estimated using Paulo's ( 2007) model as a proxy for earnings management. Next, a second regression with the quarterly discretionary accruals and dummy variables representative of each quarter was used. The results indicate that the magnitude average of discretionary accruals are higher in the fourth and last quarter, and discretionary accruals for the first quarter were significantly different from the second and third quarter. These findings suggest that managers adjust the firm's performance report more strongly at the end of the year as it becomes the last opportunity to use discretion over accounting numbers with the intent to achieve annual goals.

The Effect of Discretionary Accruals on Firm Growth. Empirical Evidence for Smes From Emerging Europe

“…In the second interpretation, the DAC dimension is predominantly associated with the level of opportunistic behavior of managers, conducted in order to manipulate the results and which leads to the reduction of the quality of financial information (Jones, 1991;Teoh et al, 1998;Zéghal et al, 2011;Pelucio-Grecco et al, 2014;Arun et al, 2015;Lo et al, 2017;Rodrigues et al, 2019). Defined as earnings management, these practices can alter the information published by companies by changing accounting treatments or valuation methods (Zang, 2012) or by using specific transaction-handling actions to mislead stakeholders about the level of performance achieved, with consequences on the contractual benefits dependent on the published accounting data (Healy & Wahlen, 1999).…”

A remuneração dos executivos mitiga os accruals discricionários? Uma análise em bancos brasileiros de capital aberto

“…Contudo, essa estratégia de manipulação faz com que os relatórios financeiros tenham diminuição em seu grau de qualidade e, de acordo com Scott (2009), pode prejudicar o processo decisório dos usuários externos. Isso, porque, quando os relatórios financeiros apresentam informações que são gerenciadas, os eventos econômicos não são refletidos adequadamente (Rodrigues, Melo & Paulo, 2019) e, dessa forma, pode prejudicar a comunicação entre a empresa e os usuários externos, haja vista, que de acordo com Ge (2009) esses usuários utilizam as informações que estão presentes nos relatórios financeiros para entender a saúde econômico-financeira da empresa.…”

Multinacionalidade, ativos intangíveis e agressividade fiscal

“…A agressividade fiscal é também inferida pela falta de mecanismos de controle do monitoramento de transações intragrupo, práticas relacionadas à manipulação dos lucros que objetivam apenas a redução da carga tributária, que podem trazer impactos diretos na evasão fiscal aos cofres públicos (Eccles, 1985;Emmanuel & Mehafdi, 1994;Colbert & Spicer, 1995;Taylor & Richardson, 2015;Ramos & Martinez, 2018;Rodrigues, Melo, & Paulo, 2019). Nerudova et al (2020) se propuseram a identificar os canais de transferência de lucros a partir dos dados de Estados Membros da União Europeia.…”