Earnings management and issue characteristics: an empirical analysis of IPOs in India

Purpose This study aims to examine earnings management around initial public offerings (IPOs) in India. It also explores the influence of issue characteristics on earnings management around the IPOs. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 511 IPOs that came during April 2003-March 2019 is studied for calculating earnings management for pre-issue, issue and post-issue years. Using Cross-Sectional Modified Jones Model, the paper presents earnings management on the basis of three proxies i.e. discretionary accruals, discretionary current accruals and discretionary long-term accruals. The influence of issue characteristics on earnings management practised around the IPOs is also observed through correlation and multiple regression analysis. Findings The paper finds that earnings management is abnormally high during the issue year compared with pre-issue and post-issue years. It also unveils that profitability, premium, age, and size of the issuer significantly determine the level of pre-issue and issue year earnings management practised by Indian IPO issuers. Research limitations/implications The findings are useful to stakeholders (potential investors, analysts and regulators) to observe, assess and understand the quality of financial numbers that are based on fallacious disclosure of accounting figures. It provides insight into the possibilities of managed earnings around the issue that could influence investors’ decision-making. Further, the study reflects the efficacy of Indian regulatory norms for IPOs. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, it is the only Indian study that had used an extensive data set of about two decades to calculate earnings management during pre-issue, issue and post-issue years. The uniqueness of the study further lies in three proxies of earnings management representing short-term and long-term accruals. Moreover, it is the first study to observe the influence of IPO issue characteristics on earnings management.

Investor Sentiments and Fama–French Five-Factor Premia

This study provides new insights to predict the excess return of a security. As if factor premia are getting influenced by the sentiments that means sentiments are ultimately affecting the excess return of a security. To meet the objective, a composite index developed by Baker and Wurgler is used as sentiment proxy. Monthly data are used from July 1965 to September 2015 in U.S. context. Granger casualty, Vector Autoregression (VAR), and Fama–Macbeth regression are applied to get the results. Results show that investor sentiments significantly drive the Fama factors’ premia: size premium and profitability premium. Sentiments also contain some information to explain the investment premia but fail to explain the market risk premium and value premium. Furthermore, results suggest that sentiments increase the explanatory power of model measured by R square. In short, this study suggests that investor sentiments play a role in explaining the Fama–French five-factor premia.

Relevance of Leverage and Profitability in Risk-Return Paradox: A Study from Pakistan Stock Exchange

The purpose of this investigation has to investigate the degree of relevance of these components in the domain of asset pricing by augmenting the basic FF-5 factor model with leverage and profitability that whether leverage-profitability dumping portfolios capturing the return by this model. We performed the five-factor model of Fama-French to capture the joint effect of variables and augmented it with leverage and profitability for the Pakistani market utilizing current periodic month-to-month data from the year 1998 to the year 2019. Construction of factors (MKT, SMB, HML, HLMLL, and RMW) is done for the PSX market and scrutinize that how much this five-factor augmented model detentions the returns premium in the Pakistani equity market. To analyze the model experimentally that consolidate subgroups of its factors that explain the portfolio's normal returns are outlined to make tremendous spreads in size, B/M, leverage and profitability and to capture the pattern for observing their imperativeness, 2X2X2X2 sorted version is adopted to construct the factors. Investigation documents the significant evidence on the leverage and profitability premium. Taking a glimpse at the variables alone, the recently presented leverage and profitability factors show alluring, measurably critical returns for a long/short basis for the Pakistani equity market.

Capturing Profitability in Asset Pricing Models for Japanese Equities 1994-2016

We follow Ball et al. (2015) to investigate and compare firms’ gross profit, operating profit, and net income as predictors of returns for a cross-section of traded Japanese equities spanning 1994-2016. We test the predictive power of profit measures on cross-sectional stock returns using portfolio tests and Fama-MacBeth regressions, find that gross-profit-to-book-equity significantly predict returns on sampled stocks. Consistent with Novy-Marx (2013), we also find that sorting portfolios by gross profitability and book-to-market ratios outperform in the Japanese market. Hence, we create a Market-Profitability-Value model that captures value and profitability premium among returns of sampled stocks. Based on Gibbons-Ross-Shanken test and economic value, we demonstrate that our enhanced model outperforms Fama–French multiple-factor model in isolating influences on equity returns.