Um estudo empírico do gerenciamento de resultados por meio de decisões operacionais nas empresas abertas brasileiras

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether Brazilian companies listed on the BM&FBovespa, at the period from 2008 to 2013 on the eve of the negative results used earnings management through operational decisions in order to avoid reporting losses. To achieve this goal we followed Roychowdhury (2006) focusing on three forms of manipulation of financial results as operational decisions: i) handling sales, ii) reduction of discretionary expenses (selling, general and administrative expensives) and iii) overproduction or increased production to report lower Cost of Goods Sold. The metric used to verify whether these companies avoided to disclose losses, was frequency distribution methodology considering the variable net income divided by total assets (profit margin) and net income for quarter t less net income from the same quarter last year, divided by Total Assets (Change in Profit Margin). Furthermore, were used regression models taking by other authors as Roychowdhury (2006) to estimate normal levels of Cash Flow from Operations, Sales, General and Administrative Expenses and Production Levels. From the normal levels of these variables were measured abnormal levels of Operating Cash Flow, the Selling, General and Administrative Expensives and Production Levels, considered proxies of real earnings management. The results showed, first, that Brazilian companies listed on the BM&FBovespa, at the period 2008-2013, did not utilize the manipulation of sales to manage the accounting result, used production levels to decrease book income and selling, general and administrative expenses served to increase the net income. Regarding not to disclose losses, the results indicated that companies used only selling expenses, general and administrative expenses for such purpose. My results do not provide evidence to permit the inference that companies used to handling sales and production levels to avoid reporting losses. Additionally, it is found by an aggregate measure of REM, the overall strategy for managing the accounting results using operational decisions. The results showed that companies that reported profit margin between 0 and 1% used REM to increase the book profit and avoid reporting losses. On the other hand, the same was not true when analyzing the change of variable profit margin. In other words, companies seem more concerned about avoiding disclose losses in the period in which disclouse their financial information to the detriment of comparison with previous periods.