Management can also release the reserves and create additional earnings, by subsequently reducing investment (Penman and Zhang, 2002).
3.8 Using the derivatives According to the SFAS #133 “Accounting for Derivative Instruments and Hedging Activities”, if the company has fair value hedge on the available for sale securities, the unrealized holding gain or loss on the available for sale securities will not be reported in the comprehensive income statement and will be reported in the income statement to offset the gain or loss on the change of the fair value of the hedging instrument. So the manager can manipulate the income by buying a hedging instrument (for example, put option) for a specific period of time in order to switch the unrealized gain or loss from the comprehensive income statement to the income statement. Thus, the manager will realize a controlled amount of gain or loss when selling the available for sale securities at a certain point of time.
4. Model development Although the phrase “earnings quality” is widely used, there is neither an agreed-upon meaning assigned to the phrase nor a generally accepted approach to measuring earnings quality. There are three basic approaches to measure the quality of earnings which control three different dimensions of earning management.
The first approach is focusing on the variability of earnings based on the idea that managers tend to smooth income because they believe that the investors prefer smoothly increased income. The notion of this approach is the relative absence of variability – is sometimes associated with higher-quality earnings. Leuz et al. (2003) measures the variability of earnings by calculating the ratio of the standard deviation of operating earnings to the standard deviation of cash from operations (smaller ratios imply more income smoothing).
The second approach is suggested by Barton and Simko (2002), which is focusing on the idea of earnings surprise as reflected in the beginning balance of net operating assets relative to sales. They provide empirical evidence that firms with large beginning balance of net operating assets relative to sales are less likely to report a predetermined earnings surprise.
The third approach is focusing on the ratio of cash from operation to income, this measuring of earnings quality is based on the notion that the closeness to cash means higher quality earnings, as mentioned by Penman (2001), this is the simplest technique to measure the earnings quality.
The model will use these three approaches to measure the quality of earnings, the notion is; the result of each measure will be different based on the type of industry, market capitalization, number of employees, and many other factors. If one industry (company) is showing low quality of earnings according to the three approaches, that will confirm the existence of earnings management in that industry (company). On the other hand if there is no consistency among the three measures for one industry or company, the quality of earning will be questionable and needs further investigations and analysis. Finally, if there is consistency among the three measures for one industry (company) that will confirm that the accounting information represents the real economic performance of the industry without any interference from the management. Table I presents the three-dimension model.