Earnings Manipulation and Managerial Investment Decisions: Evidence from Sponsored Pension PlansDaniel Bergstresser, Mihir A. Desai, Joshua Rauh
NBER Working Paper No. 10543 Managers appear to manipulate firm earnings when they characterize pension assets to capital markets and alter investment decisions to justify, and capitalize on, these manipulations. We construct a measure of the sensitivity of reported earnings to the assumed long-term rate of return on pension assets. Managers are more aggressive with assumed long-term rates of return when their assumptions have a greater impact on reported earnings. Managers also increase assumed rates of return as they prepare to acquire other firms and as they exercise stock options, further confirming the opportunistic nature of these increases. Decisions about assumed rates of return, in turn, influence asset allocation within pension plans. Instrumental variables results suggest that a 25 basis point increase in the assumed rate of return is associated with a 5% increase in equity allocation. Taken together, these results suggest that earnings manipulation arising from managerial motivations influences significant managerial investment decisions. A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the December 2004 NBER Digest.
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Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w10543 Published: Bergstresser, Daniel, Mihir Desai and Joshua Rauh. "Earnings Manipulation, Pension Assumptions, And Managerial Investment Decisions," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2006, v121(1,Feb), 157-195. Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
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