분기이익에 대한 차별적 이익조정 행태－이익/손실기업과 실제 활동을 통한 이익조정을 중심으로－

The information contents of the interim financial statements are less likely to be reliable than those of the annual statement, because the auditing process is less intensively applied to the interim financial statements than those applied to the annual statements and while annual statements are submitted within 90 days after fiscal ends, the interim statements are required to be submitted within 45 days after quarter ends. In the prior literature, it is shown that, in the fourth quarters, the level of the earnings itself is lower and the extent to which earnings is managed through accruals is less prevalent, compared with in any other quarters. From the findings, the researchers consistently argue that the closer to the fiscal year ends of the firms, the more attention the auditors and the investors pay to the reliability of the annual reports that include the fourth quarter's performance, leading to less earnings management in the fourth quarters. The first purpose of our paper is to investigate whether the distinctive nature of the fourth quarter earnings is driven from the differential earnings managements between the profit firms and the loss firms. The second is to investigate whether the suspected firms, which are suspected to have managed earnings to meet or beat the zero earnings thresholds or the expectations of the shareholders, have used real activity earnings management when accruals－based earnings management is not allowed. By dividing the total sample into the profit and the loss firms, we find that the level of quarterly earnings and the quarterly earnings management differ between the profit and the loss firms through the year. The fourth quarter discretionary accruals of the profit firms are positive, which is contrary to the results of prior studies, whereas the fourth quarter discretionary accruals of the loss firms are negative, of which magnitude is enormously larger than that of discretionary accruals of the profit firms. This implies that the general phenomena that, in the fourth quarters, the earnings and its management are dramatically lowered is due to the dominance of the loss firms on the profit firms. Next, for the suspected firms, we find that they do real activity earnings management to get earnings above zero in the fourth quarters, instead of using accruals－based earnings management. This implies that at least for the suspected firms, real activity earnings management can be used as a substitution for accruals－based earnings management.