Manipulation and obfuscation of financial reports

IF 2.2 3区管理学 Q2 BUSINESS, FINANCE

Journal of Business Finance & Accounting Pub Date : 2023-02-22 DOI:10.1111/jbfa.12693

Nikolaj Niebuhr Lambertsen

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Anecdotally, not all investors are able to read and understand the financial report. I consider a strategic reporting game where investors are bounded rational and only pay attention to randomly sampled parts of the financial report and then extrapolate the value of the firm based on this. The manager can both obfuscate and bias the financial report. Obfuscation works by disaggregating the report into any number of line items, modeled as nonnegative signals, whose mean is constrained to be equal to the biased profitability of the firm. There can be synergies between biasing and obfuscation, causing financial statements to be both less transparent and more biased when investors are extrapolative.

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操纵和混淆财务报告

据传闻，并非所有投资者都能阅读和理解财务报告。我认为，在战略报告博弈中，投资者是有界理性的，他们只关注财务报告中随机抽样的部分，然后据此推断公司的价值。管理者既可以混淆财务报告，也可以使其产生偏差。混淆的方法是将报告分解成任意数量的细列项目，这些细列项目被模拟为非负信号，其平均值被限制为等于公司的偏差盈利能力。偏差与混淆之间可能存在协同效应，当投资者进行推断时，财务报表的透明度会降低，偏差也会增加。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Business Finance & Accounting BUSINESS, FINANCE-

CiteScore

4.40

自引率

17.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Journal of Business Finance and Accounting exists to publish high quality research papers in accounting, corporate finance, corporate governance and their interfaces. The interfaces are relevant in many areas such as financial reporting and communication, valuation, financial performance measurement and managerial reward and control structures. A feature of JBFA is that it recognises that informational problems are pervasive in financial markets and business organisations, and that accounting plays an important role in resolving such problems. JBFA welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions. Nonetheless, theoretical papers should yield novel testable implications, and empirical papers should be theoretically well-motivated. The Editors view accounting and finance as being closely related to economics and, as a consequence, papers submitted will often have theoretical motivations that are grounded in economics. JBFA, however, also seeks papers that complement economics-based theorising with theoretical developments originating in other social science disciplines or traditions. While many papers in JBFA use econometric or related empirical methods, the Editors also welcome contributions that use other empirical research methods. Although the scope of JBFA is broad, it is not a suitable outlet for highly abstract mathematical papers, or empirical papers with inadequate theoretical motivation. Also, papers that study asset pricing, or the operations of financial markets, should have direct implications for one or more of preparers, regulators, users of financial statements, and corporate financial decision makers, or at least should have implications for the development of future research relevant to such users.