我国上市公司CFO薪酬与盈余质量的相关性研究

本文研究了我国上市公司CFO薪酬与盈余质量的相关性.研究发现,随着我国上市公司治理机制的不断完善,上市公司逐步建立起了以盈余为业绩指标的CFO薪酬激励机制.通过文章逐层递进的研究,我们发现我国上市公司CFO薪酬激励契约显著地区别反映了盈余中的非经常性损益和经常性损益,但是却未能有效地区别反映经常性损益中的应计项目和经营性现金流,存在类似"功能锁定"的现象.进一步细分研究样本后,我们发现由于盈余管理上市公司CFO薪酬激励契约对非经常性损益和经常性损益的不合理权重赋值,扭亏上市公司的CFO薪酬激励契约反而刺激了CFO进行盈余管理.根据研究我们认为,解决CFO薪酬激励契约对应计项目和经营性现金流的"功能锁定"现象,改进盈余管理上市公司CFO薪酬激励契约成为目前我国上市公司完善CFO薪酬激励机制的两个重要任务.

The Research on the Relevance between CFO Compensation and Earnings Quality of Chinese Listed Companies

This paper investigates the relevance between CFO compensation and earning quality of listed companies in China. According to agency theory, we predict that CFO compensation plan can react significantly differently to extraordinary items, earnings before extraordinary items, accruals and operating cash flows, which reflect earnings quality. Our sample is composed of 1127 firm-years from 2005 to 2006. We design three models to test our hypotheses. Prior empirical research finds that CFO compensation is not significantly relevant to earnings quality in Chinese listed companies. In contrast, we find that, following the improvement of corporate governance, the CFO profit-oriented incentive compensation mechanism is gradually formed, which makes a breakthrough compared to the previous one. Our results show that the CFO compensation plan reacts significantly differently to extraordinary items and earnings before extraordinary items, but fails to reflect the differences between accruals and operating cash flows. This finding implies a "function fixation" phenomenon. For our further study, we then divide the whole sample into two subsamples. The subsample analysis indicates that CFOs in eliminated loss firms are more likely to manage earnings, because of the inappropriate weights assigned by the current compensation plan to extraordinary items and earnings before extraordinary items. Again, this result implies that "function fixation" also exists in earnings before extraordinary items. Tests on the profit-smoothing subsample indicates that weights assigned to extraordinary items and earnings before extraordinary items are appropriate and CFO compensation plan can better distinguish between accruals and operating cash flows, but still not significantly. In the sensitivity analyses, we revise the previous three models and further test our hypotheses. Results in sensitivity tests are consistent with our hypotheses and all of our main results. In conclusion, to improve the CFO compensation plan system in Chinese listed companies, we need to solve the "function fixation" effect of CFO compensation contract on accruals and operating cash flows, while improve the CFO compensation plan in companies with earnings management problems.