| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 會計學系碩士班 === 94 === Abstract：
Researchers in academia and industries have been interested in value-relevance of financial statements. Investors have paid more attention to balance sheet and income statement because they usually considered these financial statements as the basis to judge the value of a company. However, in economical environments, researchers also focus on how investors view the relative value-relevance of financial numbers. According to previous research, most studies exploring the motivation of earning management and its impact on value-relevance of financial numbers are based on the opportunistic earnings management hypothesis, and there are relatively little evidences on the informative earnings management. Therefore, this study is aimed at examining the effect of informative earnings management on the value-relevance of different financial numbers. This study uses the investment opportunity set (hereafter, IOS) to proxy the informative earnings management behavior. Furthermore, this research will also test whether IOS can be the substitute variable for informative earnings management.
The empirical findings are summarized as follows： First, Earnings and book value of equity both are value-relevant, which means that investors use earnings number in income statement and book value of equity in balance sheet to evaluate a company’s value. Second, regardless of the direction of discretionary accruals, the companies with higher IOS engage more earnings management activities. That means the managers in the company of high investment opportunity have more private information, and tend to communicate their own information through earnings management action. Third, discretionary accruals and non-discretionary accruals are both with positive value-relevance. Although Investors think that over-manipulate will cause the reliability of earnings decrease, accrual items can be used to solve the problems of the timing of recognition and make investor positively value discretionary accruals Fourth, IOS enhance the positive relation between discretionary accruals and stock value. That is, higher IOS a company has, more reliance on the discretionary accruals investor evaluate. In other words, it is more common that the company with IOS works on informative earnings management more than on opportunistic earnings management. Fifth, the value-relevance of earnings and book value of company are increased with IOS. That is, when a company is working on informative earnings management, investors believe that informative earnings management can increase the whole quality of financial statement.
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