Analyst Coverage and Real Earnings Management: Quasi-Experimental Evidence
利用券商合并导致的分析师覆盖外生减少，发现管理者在覆盖减少后减少实际盈余管理、增加应计盈余操纵，表明分析师压力促使管理者使用实际盈余管理提升短期业绩。
Abstract We study how securities analysts influence managers’ use of different types of earnings management. To isolate causality, we employ a quasi-experiment that exploits exogenous reductions in analyst following resulting from brokerage house mergers. We find that managers respond to the coverage loss by decreasing real earnings management while increasing accrual manipulation. These effects are significantly stronger among firms with less coverage and for firms close to the zero-earnings threshold. Our causal evidence suggests that managers use real earnings management to enhance short-term performance in response to analyst pressure, effects that are not uncovered when focusing solely on accrual-based methods.