The Impact Of Social Responsibility Information Disclosure And Analyst Tracking On Earnings Management

As an important part of non-financial information disclosure of listed companies,Social responsibility is attracting more and more attention from all social groups.Listed companies take social responsibility report as the carrier,passing on their social responsibilities to information users.There are some disputes about the relationship between social responsibility and earnings management.These disputes become the focus of domestic and foreign academic circles.On the one hand,because of the pressure by moral codes and more attention from the outside world,companies with a high degree of social responsibility information disclosure will restrain their earnings management behavior.On the other hand,The economic motivation to fulfill social responsibility information disclosure will also cause the social responsibility information disclosure become the enterprise image signal transmission tool in practice,which have more camouflage effect and will hide the earnings management behavior of enterprise.Therefore,it is necessary for discussion of this dispute,and inspection whether social responsibility has the role of inhibition for accrual earnings management and real earnings management.At present,the forms of social responsibility information disclosure in China are classified into obligatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure.By analyzing the different motives and characteristics of social responsibility under different disclosure nature,the specific ways in which social responsibility information disclosure affects earnings management can be distinguished,that is the quality of the social responsibility information disclosure can affect its inhibitory effect on earnings management.Analysts are an important force for external supervision.When a listed company receives a high degree of attention from analysts,it also means that the company receives more attention and the information quality of social responsibility information disclosure will be affected.Therefore,it is also worth further discussion whether analyst tracking affects the role of social responsibility information disclosure in earnings management and whether it will differ on the impact of different approaches to earnings management.This paper takes the listed companies,which issued the social responsibility report from 2012 to 2018,as the research sample.Combining with China's social responsibility report implementation and disclosure status and understanding of the concepts associated with earnings management and analyst tracking,basing on the information asymmetry theory,stakeholder theory and reputation theory,this paper study the impact of social responsibility disclosed by listed companies on accrual earnings management and real earnings management behaviors,and distinguish whether social responsibility under different disclosure nature will have different impacts on earnings management.Finally,considering the function of analyst track within the scope of inspection,and testing whether the interaction between analyst tracking and social responsibility information disclosure has different degrees of impact on earnings management and whether it's different between accrued earnings management and real earnings management.The results show that:(1)Social responsibility information disclosure can effectively restrain the degree of accrual earnings management and real earnings management.(2)Compared with the voluntary disclosure of social responsibility,the regulatory social responsibility report plays a stronger role in restraining accrual earnings management and real earnings management.(3)Analysts trace interactions with social responsibility information disclosure can restrain accrual earnings management more significant,and the inhibitory effect for real earnings management is weakened.When faced with more supervision risks,listed companies will not only restrain their earnings management behaviors,but also adjust the ways of earnings management to avoid earnings manipulation being found.This paper is mainly divided into six parts,the details are as follows:The first part is the introduction.In this part,this paper will expound the background and motivation of the topic,the content and significance of the research,the thinking and framework of the research,and the innovation points of this paper.The second part is the literature review.This paper mainly sorts out the domestic and foreign literatures related to social responsibility information disclosure,earnings management,the relationship between social responsibility information disclosure and earnings management and this relationship join with analyst tracking.The last part is literature review,summarizing and evaluating the above literatures.The third part is relevant theories and hypotheses.This part will elaborate the theory related to the research topic,carry on the concrete logic analysis,thus elicits the research hypothesis.The fourth part is empirical research design.The econometric model is constructed.Correlation variables are set.The samples and data sources are introduced.The fifth part is the empirical result analysis.This paper mainly includes descriptive statistics,correlation analysis between variables and regression results.Then,the robustness test and further analysis are conducted based on the results.The sixth part is the conclusion and inspiration.On the basis of regression analysis,the research conclusion and suggestions of this paper are drawn.Finally,according to the research direction of this paper,the existing deficiencies and the status of the policy environment,the future research is prospected.The innovation points studied in this paper are as follows:(1)This paper studies the impact of social responsibility information disclosure and its interaction with analysts tracking on earnings management,and dividing the earnings management area into accrual earnings management and real earnings management.Thus,it will distinguish between the impact of social responsibility information disclosure and analyst tracking on earnings management,making up for some flaws in previous research,strengthening the importance of real earnings management.(2)Based on the enterprise performance and different motives of disclosure social responsibility,this paper distinguish the impact of social responsibility information disclosure with different disclosure nature on earnings management,which will identifies the source of controversy in the past research,that is low quality social responsibility may have negative effects,This paper also adds analyst tracking variables to control the reliability of social responsibility information disclosure,which is rarely seen in previous literature,having marginal contribution to resolving the dispute between social responsibility information disclosure and earnings management,widening the research field of vision for social responsibility information disclosure and earnings management.(3)This Paper further analyzes the nature of property rights to the research conclusion,concluding that the inhibiting effect of non-state-owned enterprises social responsibility information disclosure and its interaction with analyst tracking to accrual earnings management are more significant,but it's less effective to real earnings managrnent.This makes the research conclusion of this paper more targeted,which will enhances the attention for non-state-owned enterprises social responsibility report of those shareholders and policymakers.