Earnings Management to Avoid Earnings Declines across Publicly and Privately Held Banks
比较公开与私有银行控股公司，发现公开银行更常通过贷款损失准备和证券收益实现来消除小额盈利下降，从而报告更长的连续盈利增长序列，表明盈利管理是造成盈利变化不对称分布的原因。
This study compares samples of publicly and privately held bank holding companies to examine whether the high frequency of small earnings increases relative to small earnings decreases reported by public firms is attributable to earnings management. We expect public banks' shareholders to be more likely than private banks' shareholders to rely on simple earnings-based heuristics in evaluating firm performance, so we expect public banks to have more incentives to report steadily increasing earnings. Consistent with this expectation, we find that relative to private banks, public banks: (1) report fewer small earnings declines, (2) are more likely to use the loan loss provision and security gain realizations to eliminate small earnings decreases, and (3) report longer strings of consecutive earnings increases. These results suggest that the asymmetric pattern of more small earnings increases than decreases, first documented by Burgstahler and Dichev (1997), is attributable to earnings management and is not simply a reflection of the underlying distribution of earnings changes.