Chan "et al". (2006b) suggest that managers might announce a share buyback to manipulate investors' perceptions and capitalize on the positive price reaction usually associated with the announcement. The incentive to do so is greater when managers have exercisable options. Prior studies document that managers engage in upwards earnings management for opportunistic reasons related to option holdings (Bergstresser and Philippon, 2006). We examine the association between earnings management and exercisable option holdings for buyback firms to investigate if earnings management in the pre-buyback period is greater for firms with equity incentives to increase share price. Our results, using 138 buybacks over the period 1996-2003, support our prediction. We find that buyback firms with both exercisable options that are in-the-money prior to the buyback announcement as well as options that are exercised in the buyback period have higher discretionary current accruals than buyback firms with no exercisable options, unexercised options or with out-of-the-money options. Overall, our results are consistent with buyback firms with exercisable options using earnings management and buyback announcements to maximize option payoffs, and buyback firms without exercisable options signalling undervaluation. Copyright (c) The Authors.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand in its journal Accounting & Finance.