激励报告的重要性：欧洲的私营和公共企业的盈余管理【外文翻译】.doc

本科毕业论文（设计） 外 文 翻 译 外文题目 The importance of Reporting Incentives: Earnings Management in European Private and Public Firms. 外文出处 Accounting Review 外文作者 Davia C. Burgstahler , Luzi Hail and Christian Leuz 原文： The importance of Reporting Incentives: Earnings Management in European Private and Public Firms. Much of the international accounting debate has focused on accounting standards per se, which are often viewed as the primary input for high-quality accounting (e.g., Levitt 1998). Consistent with this view, harmonization efforts within the European Union have largely focused on eliminating differences in accounting standards across countries or adopting a common set of standards (e.g., Van Hulle 2004). However, it is important to also examine the role of institutional factors and capital market forces in shaping firms’ incentives to report informative earnings. The application of standards involves judgment and underlying measurements are often based on private information. The resulting discretion can be used by corporate insiders either to make reported earnings more informative about the firm’s economic performance or to serve other and less benign interests. For this reason, reporting incentives and the forces shaping them are likely to play an integral role for accounting quality. While this insight is not new (e.g., Watts and Zimmerman 1986), it is often overlooked in international standard setting.1 To empirically document the importance of reporting incentives, we examine the properties of reported earnings of private and public firms in the European Union (EU). The European setting provides a unique opportunity because EU accounting regulation is based on a firm’s legal form, rather than listing status. Thus, private limited companies face largely the same accounting standards as publicly traded corporations, but are subject