The Role of Overbilling in Hospitals’ Earnings Management Decisions
研究医院通过过度收费（将患者错误分类到更高报销的诊断组）来操纵收入，发现这减少了医院使用应计项目或削减酌量性支出，且在不同约束下管理者偏好不同操纵方式。
This paper examines the role of overbilling in hospitals’ earnings management choices. Overbilling by hospitals is a form of revenue manipulation that involves misclassifying a patient into a diagnosis-related group that yields higher reimbursement. As overbilling allows hospitals to increase revenues without altering operations, affecting costs, or having to reverse such behavior in the future, I propose and find that overbilling reduces hospitals’ use of managing accruals or cutting discretionary expenditures. Next, I find that hospital managers prefer overbilling to managing accruals (cutting discretionary expenditures) when cutting discretionary expenditures (managing accruals) is constrained, and vice versa. Collectively, my findings suggest that overbilling is an important alternative manipulation tool in hospitals.