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Earnings management and managerial honesty: the investors’ perspectives

  • Extant research shows that CEO characteristics affect earnings management. This paper studies how investors infer a specific characteristic of CEOs, namely moral commitment to honesty, from earnings management and how this perception – in conjunction with their own social and moral preferences – shapes their investment choices. We conduct two laboratory experiments simulating investment choices. Our results show that participants perceive a CEO to be more committed to honesty when they infer that the CEO engaged less in earnings management. For investment decisions, a one standard deviation increase in a CEO's perceived commitment to honesty compared to another CEO reduces the relevance of differences in the CEOs’ claimed future returns by 40%. This effect is most prominent among investors with a proself value orientation. To prosocial investors, their own honesty values and those attributed to the CEO matter directly, while returns play a secondary role. Overall, perceived CEO honesty matters to different investors for distinct reasons.

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Author:Rajna Gibson, Matthias Sohn, Carmen Tanner, Alexander F. Wagner
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-616471
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2912795
Parent Title (English):European Corporate Governance Institute: ECGI Working Paper Series in Finance ; No. 516/2017, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper ; No. 17-03, LawFin working paper ; No. 7
Series (Serial Number):LawFin Working Paper (7)
Publisher:Center for Advanced Studies on the Foundations of Law and Finance, House of Finance, Goethe University
Place of publication:Frankfurt am Main
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Year of Completion:2021
Year of first Publication:2021
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2021/09/09
Tag:earnings management; honesty; investor preferences; investor segmentation; protected values
Issue:February 10, 2021
Page Number:88
Last Page:SA-33
Institutes:Rechtswissenschaft / Rechtswissenschaft
Wirtschaftswissenschaften / Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / House of Finance (HoF)
Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / Center for Financial Studies (CFS)
Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe (SAFE)
Wissenschaftliche Zentren und koordinierte Programme / DFG-Forschergruppen / Foundation of Law and Finance
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 34 Recht / 340 Recht
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht