Манипулирование прибылью компаниями при эмиссии акций

In our research we are interested in finding out whether the Russian firms are influenced to change their Earnings Management by the IPO prospect. The Earnings Management is a major part of firms’ activities and represents a valuable lever to achieve a variety of company needs. It specifically influences the market perception, how the firm is viewed by investors, media, clients, partners and a variety of other different actors. Through Earnings Management the firm can target a specific time period where it needs to change the perception of the market players. And what better time to influence the market than the time around the IPO. By presenting better performances the companies can show that they are more profitable and thus can acquire higher investments from the IPO. But what is good for the company, is not necessarily so for other market players. In a sense, they bought the product, that is not what they hoped it was. If they knew that the company managed its earnings to show better results for a certain period, they might have provided less money for a share in such a company or not engage with it at all. But these players don’t know whether the firms are engaged in Earnings Management. Our paper will show whether the Earnings Management in Russian firms is naturally increased by the fact of the IPO’s proximity. This in turn will show the market players, should they naturally expect from Russian firm to have abnormal profits around the time of IPO or not.
Although the Earnings Management has other uses, for example more internal ones, such as tax manipulations, in this research we will concentrate on the outside influence of earning management as is naturally assumed around IPO. Existing articles in this sphere concentrate mostly on the developed markets, such as United States of America or United Kingdom. The number of works dedicated to emerging markets is quite limited, and even fewer are dedicated to Russian Federation. That naturally leads us to believe that there exists the research gap, that we aim to fill with our paper. The major paper, that covers this research gap was written in 2019 by the Associate Professor of GSOM Egor D. Nikulin (Nikulin and Sviridov 2019). Nevertheless, our work has some differences in comparison. First, in addition to analyzing Accrual Based Earnings Management, we are also trying to see the levels of Real Earnings Management exhibited by Russian companies around IPO. This gap was not covered before, as the Real Earnings Management is a relatively new topic in the research sphere and especially for the papers, dedicated to the emerging markets, such as Russian one. Secondly, we analyze a quarterly data, compared to the yearly one, used in most researches, including the one written by Nikulin (Nikulin and Sviridov 2019). In addition to that we have another dataset – we employ a different time period and hence include different firms in it. These differences and the fact of the overall low coverage of this topic in Russia leads us to believe that our research is related to the existing research gap.
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Our main goal is to prove the existence of upwards Earnings Management in Russian firms around IPO. Even though the contrary results will also be accepted as viable outcomes, we strongly believe that the Earnings Management levels will indeed be positive. These expectations are related to the findings in other emerging markets and we believe that those results can be extrapolated for the Russian case. At the same time, we want to also analyze the Earnings Management around IPO more in depth. Specifically, we aim at better classifying the companies in question to provide more practical results, as the analysts will be able to better predict the levels of Earnings Management for the particular company they are analyzing. The specific characteristics by which we are going to split the companies will be decided upon during the literature review, as the insights provided by other authors will help us to better see the trends in Earnings Management around IPO.
To better keep track of all the required aspects of our research we created the following list of objectives:
1) Analyze different definitions of the term Earnings management and choose the one that we are going to use in our research;
2) Understand how to measure the Earnings Management and which is the most suitable way for that in our case;
3) Gather insights and formulate hypotheses through researching the works of other authors;
4) Formulate the list of needed variables and gather the data;
5) Conduct econometric analysis and collect the residuals, that serve as a proxy of
Earnings Management;
6) Analyze the results of econometric analysis – confirm or deny hypotheses, provide
explanations for the results and discuss possible problems with them;
7) Underline further ways of research activity.