Earnings quality and national IPO: AEM practices of Central Asia

Once the key insights of corporate finance quality in Kazakhstani listed state SOEs are obtained, it is time to turn to separate strategies of corporate reporting manipulations. The purpose of this research is to look at accrual-based AEM strategies that adjust real activity REM practices at year-end. We follow Kasznik cash flow model for accrual-based earnings management as a best practice methodology and apply it to 572 unbalanced panel firm-year non-financial observations over 13-year time horizon. To strengthen our analysis, we compare main results with another popular measurement of accrual-based Earnings management based on the Shivakumar 1996 model. We also winsorised key investment indicators to reduce the impact of outliers on the main results. The results answer major questions: 1) what AEM strategies state SOEs prefer; 2) how accrual-based manipulations affect the choice of investment indicators; and 3) whether partially-privatized state SOEs under/over perform private POEs in Kazakhstan. In terms of theoretical and practical implications, our research findings could be useful to analysts of various strategies in the AEM/REM dimensions, academic scientists and advocates of partial privatization of state companies. We assure that theoretical gaps of corporate data manipulations in Central Asian context are to be reduced with increasing number of publications in the field of AEM practices.

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