IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/raaexx/v25y2018i3-4p463-480.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Executive pension, default risk, and earnings management

Author

Listed:
  • Byungjin Kwak
  • Kyoungwon Mo

Abstract

The value of executive pension plans depends significantly on the incidence of bankruptcy because executive pension plans have characteristics similar to unsecured debt. These unique characteristics lead us to investigate whether managers change their firms’ accounting policy to protect their pension plans when their firms face imminent default risk. Identifying a firm’s default risk with various proxies, we find that managers with executive pension plans are more likely to engage in income-increasing earnings management during a year of high default risk as compared to managers without such pension plans. The result remains robust with the use of propensity score matching and two-stage least squares regression analysis to alleviate the endogeneity issues in our hypothesized relationships. In addition, we find that the results are more pronounced for ex-post bankrupt firms.

Suggested Citation

  • Byungjin Kwak & Kyoungwon Mo, 2018. "Executive pension, default risk, and earnings management," Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting & Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(3-4), pages 463-480, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:raaexx:v:25:y:2018:i:3-4:p:463-480
    DOI: 10.1080/16081625.2016.1277951
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/16081625.2016.1277951
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/16081625.2016.1277951?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kyoungwon Mo & Kyung Jin Park & YoungJin Kim, 2019. "The Role of Institutional Investors in the Sustainable CEO Compensation Structure," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(19), pages 1-21, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:raaexx:v:25:y:2018:i:3-4:p:463-480. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/raae20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.