Characteristics of Firms Engaged in Real activity based Earnings anagement: Evidence from Korea

This paper aims to examine the characteristics of firms that are suspected to be engaged in real activity based earnings management after controlling for abnormal accruals. A real activity based earnings management directly changes a firm’s underlying operations which potentially sacrifices the firm’s future cash flows whereas an accruals based one is just a way of representing the firm’s underlying activities through a choice of accounting methods. Prior research suggests that managers have incentives to use real activities even though they know that future cash flows are sacrificed for boosting current earnings by using them. We try to infer the reason why managers are engaged in real activity based earnings management by identifying the characteristics of those firms. Firm characteristics in prior studies are mostly examined for firms that manipulate earnings using only abnormal accruals as a proxy of earnings management. To observe characteristics of earnings managing firms, it is useful to investigate firms that are highly likely to manipulate earnings using real activities and/or accruals. We concentrate on a sample of right offering firms that are documented to inflate earnings to enhance stock prices before they issue new shares. We also confirm those results based on a full sample for robustness. We compare firms that are more actively engaged in real activity based earnings management with firms that are less active in manipulating earnings using real activities. Those firms classified as being engaged in real activity based earnings management for the SEO(Seasoned Equity Offering) turn out to be more mature, smaller, less flexible financially, less profitable, and having lower ownerships. It is also found that audit quality is not associated with real activity based earnings management in the SEO sample. Consistent and much stronger results are found in a full sample except the audit quality variable, i.e., higher audit quality is related with lower real activity based earnings management for the full sample. The result implies that firms offering new shares have such a strong incentive to boost their earnings that they engage in earnings management regardless of the reputation of external auditor. A main contribution of this paper is that we identify characteristics of firms engaged in real activity based earnings management, unlike prior studies which tried to identify the characteristics of firms engaged in earnings management without considering different types of earnings management. The empirical evidence provides an insight into manager’s motivations to choose earnings management tools and contribute to future studies dealing with real activity based earnings management.