Международный журнал бухгалтерских исследований

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Is Available-For-Sale Financial Assets an Instrument for Earnings Management? Evidence from China’s A-Share Listed Companies

*KAI ZHANG, ZHIBO WANG1, HONGMING XU2

We hold the idea that if companies had sold available-for-sale (AFS) securities for earning and capital management, it can only serve as the proof that these managers had opportunistic behavior instead of suggesting any defects in contemporary accounting standards. In this paper, we empirically identify that whether companies with profit goals would tend to increase its AFS assets to manage earning in intertemporal period. Using the panel data of listed companies in China’s A-share market which had reported their investment income of selling AFS assets from 2007 to 2018, we provide evidence that even companies selling AFS to increase its book profit didn’t intend to hold more of that in previous time. Our results show that AFS assets have not been the instruments of earning management and current accounting standards needn’t to be updated.