| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 會計學系 === 90 === Earnings is the simplest and most straightforward indicator of a company’s performance. Therefore, earnings reporting could be a crucial concern for an investor’s decision-making. There are a lot of researches regarding earnings management and income smoothing focused on how the role of stakeholders and other possible factors would affect the accuracy of a company’s earnings reporting. For most companies, their shareholders control the core business activities, and thus it is hard to ignore their impact on the earnings performance. However, due to the discrepancy of investing policies and activities of different types of investor, the extent to which the types of shareholders could influence a company’s earnings can be varied. Besides, since companies in the same industry always compete for better performance resulted from investors’ relative performance evaluation, there is also a trend that the companies in the same industry would behavior in a similar way when reporting their earnings.
In order to prove that there’s a significant relationship between a company’s trend of reported earnings and its shareholders’ investing goals, this thesis collects the overall market data from 1994 to 1999 and then examines each company’s income smoothing behavior. In addition to testing whether a company’s decision to exerting income smoothing is contributed to the portions of long-term and shot-term shareholders, this thesis also tries to identify whether the industry effect exists among the electronic industry and other industries that can make different industries have discrepant income smoothing behaviors, and find the electronic industry’s income smoothing intent.
The empirical results document that: (1) A company’s income smoothing behavior is significantly related to its ownership structure; (2) A company with larger portion of long-term shareholders tends to not adopt income smoothing strategy; (3) A company with larger portion of short-term shareholders tends to adopt income smoothing strategy; (4) The industry effect is significantly related to companies’ income smoothing behaviors. Different industry has different pattern of income smoothing behavior. The companies in the electronic industry tend to not adopt income smoothing strategy.
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