股票期权奖励与盈余管理动机外文翻译(编辑修改稿)

股票期权奖励与盈余管理动机外文翻译(编辑修改稿)内容摘要：

a dividend policy might not be fully anticipated by, or in the best interests of, shareholders. Pursuing a similar argument, Jolls (1996) finds that stock repurchases tend to replace cash dividends as executive option holdings increase. In addition, the line of research that we extend documents that manipulation of voluntary disclosures and/or award dates could increase the value of option pensation. Taken together, the evidence suggests that while option pensation practices are likely to mitigate some types of agency costs, the same practices might induce other forms of opportunistic behavior. We discuss these findings in more detail along with other relevant research on earnings management below. Prior research suggests that managers manipulate earnings to achieve a variety of objectives, including ine smoothing (Gaver et al. [1995]。 DeFond and Park [1997]), longterm bonus maximization (Healy [1985]), avoidance of technical default of debt covenants (Dichev and Skinner [2020]), and avoidance of losses and declines in earnings (Burgstahler and Dichev [1997]). Murphy (1999) suggests that option pensation and outright stock ownership by managers give rise to divergent incentives, with stock ownership focusing managers39。 efforts on achieving higher total shareholder returns and options rewarding only share price appreciation relative to the exercise price. Several empirical studies provide support for these predictions (Lambert et al. [1989]。 Lewellen et al. [1987]). We conjecture that these divergent incentives could motivate managers to manipulate earnings up or down as a function of pensation structure and other factors. As an example, Matsunaga (1995) argues that, when firms are under financial distress, they attempt to reduce pensation expense by substituting options for bonus pay. Matsunaga also finds that ineincreasing accounting policy choices are positively related to option awards. By extension, this result could imply a positive relation between ineincreasing discretionary accruals and option pensation. However, Matsunaga examines only the associations between options and various financial characteristics of the firm, and his analysis does not directly examine any earnings management incentives related to option pensation. In a paper that directly addresses the association between voluntary disclosure and option pensation, Aboody and Kasznik (2020) find that managers opportunistically time the release of good and bad news in order to increase the value of their option awards. Their study provides evidence that managers receiving options prior to earnings announcements are more likely to issue preemptive bad news voluntary disclosures (as opposed to mandatory earnings announcements) prior to the option award. This evidence indicates that by positioning such disclosures in advance of an award date, managers in their sample are able to increase the value of option awards by an average of 16 percent. Consistent with this evidence, Chauvin and Shenoy (2020) find that stocks exhibit abnormal negative returns leading up to award dates, while Yermack (1997) finds abnormal positive returns following awards, Aboody and Kasznik also document that returns in the period immediately surrounding the earnings announcements are lower for those firms awarding options prior to the earnings announcement than for those awarding options after the earnings announcement. These results suggest that, all else equal, firms disclosing earnings prior to the award date might report lower earnings relative to those firms disclosing earnings after the award date. In contrast to Aboody and Kasznik (2020) and Chauvin and Shenoy (2020), Yermack (1997) concludes that the timing of an option award is conditional on the favorability of earnings announceme。