Earnings Management Using the Tax Expense, Earnings Persistence, Future Firms Performance, and Firms Value
Asian Tax Journal Vol. 24 No. 3 (2023), pp. 93-145
Abstract
This paper examines the relation between firms’ earnings management using tax expenses(hereafter TD) and earnings persistence, between TD and future firm performance, and between TD and firm value. Prior studies use the difference between cash ETR (effective tax rate) and GAAP ETR as a proxy for earnings management using tax expenses (Park and Lee 2021； Park 2022). Thus, this paper extends the work of Park and Lee (2021) by linking tax accrual to earnings persistence, future firm performance, and firm value. We measure TD following Park and Lee (2021), defined as the difference between cash ETR and GAAP ETR as a proxy of earnings management using tax expenses. Following Park (2022)’s model, we also distinguish between TD driven by economic fundamentals (innate TD) versus management choices(discretionary TD). For test, the sample used 16,170 firm－year observations over the period 2000－2020. We find that：(1) TD lead to lower earnings persistence. Specifically, we also distinguish the innate and discretionary components of TD, the results driven by management choice(discretionary TD), (2) we also find significant negative relationships between TD and future firm performance (i.e., net income, cash flows from operation activities, operating earnings), this results driven by innate TD and discretionary TD, and (3) we find significant positive relationships between TD and firm value, this results also driven by innate TD and discretionary TD. Therefore, our study is the first to document that firms’ earnings management through tax expenses using tax accruals lead to lower earnings persistence and lower future firm performance that investors do not fully anticipate the lower earnings persistence and lower future firm performance, leading to significant mispricing with respect to firm value. Thus, the results of (1) and (2) support managerial opportunism, by contrast, the results of (3) support functional fixation hypothesis. Overall, we believe these results have implications for assessments of reporting quality as well as information risk with regard to the earnings management through tax expenses. Specifically, these feature suggests that firms using tax expense to manage earnings with tax accruals is associated with lower earnings quality.
Keywords
- Earnings management through tax expenses
- The difference between cash ETR and GAAP ETR
- Innate and discretionary components
- Earnings persistence
- Future firm performance
- Firm value
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