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.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
10543.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2004 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:10543
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Find related papers by JEL classification: M41 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Accounting - - - Accounting M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Konan Chan & Louis K. C. Chan & Narasimhan Jegadeesh & Josef Lakonishok, 2001.
"Earnings Quality and Stock Returns,"
NBER Working Papers
8308, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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