Decomposing Changes in Deferred Tax Assets and Liabilities to Isolate Earnings Management Activities
通过手工收集企业递延税脚注数据，分解递延税资产和负债的变化，发现收入和费用应计及准备金的净递延税负债变化可用于识别避免盈余下降的盈余管理行为。
This paper provides evidence on the types of accounts that reveal earnings management activities. We build on Burgstahler and Dichev's (1997) evidence of earnings management to avoid an earnings decline and Phillips et al.'s (2003) findings that deferred tax expense (DTE) can be used to detect such earnings management. In particular, we investigate the relation between changes in annual earnings and changes in deferred tax asset and liability components using data hand-collected from firms' income tax footnote disclosures. Our evidence indicates that changes in the net deferred tax liability (DTL) component related to revenue and expense accruals and reserves can be used to detect earnings management to avoid an earnings decline. In addition, we build on Joos et al.'s (2003) results and partition our sample into firm-years with positive and negative changes in net DTLs and repeat our analyses. In contrast to the Joos et al. (2003) finding that DTE can be used to detect earnings management only for firm-years in which DTE is negative, we find that both subsamples reflect earnings management of revenue and expense accruals and reserves to report earnings increases.