This dissertation investigates whether short sellers establish short positions prior to accounting restatement announcements and whether the levels of short interest are related to the severity of restatements. Using 565 firms with restatement disclosure during the period of 1995 to 2002 and matched control firms with no restatements announcements, I find that the level of short interest is higher for the sample firms compared to the control firms in the months surrounding the announcements. The level of short interest increases as the restatement announcement date approaches and declines thereafter. Related to severity of restatement, I find that the level of short interest in the pre-disclosure period is higher for restatements involving fraud and the revenue accounts. There exists limited evidence that the pre-disclosure level of short interest is positively associated with the number of quarters restated and the magnitude of the restatements. Finally, I find cumulative abnormal returns surrounding the announcements are more negative for restatement firms that have a higher level of short interest. These results suggest that short sellers are highly sophisticated investors who can see through accounting manipulation and consequently profit from their knowledge.

This dissertation investigates whether short sellers establish short positions prior to accounting restatement announcements and whether the levels of short interest are related to the severity of restatements. Using 565 firms with restatement disclosure during the period of 1995 to 2002 and matched control firms with no restatements announcements, I find that the level of short interest is higher for the sample firms compared to the control firms in the months surrounding the announcements. The level of short interest increases as the restatement announcement date approaches and declines thereafter. Related to severity of restatement, I find that the level of short interest in the pre-disclosure period is higher for restatements involving fraud and the revenue accounts. There exists limited evidence that the pre-disclosure level of short interest is positively associated with the number of quarters restated and the magnitude of the restatements. Finally, I find cumulative abnormal returns surrounding the announcements are more negative for restatement firms that have a higher level of short interest. These results suggest that short sellers are highly sophisticated investors who can see through accounting manipulation and consequently profit from their knowledge.

Os principais objetivos deste trabalho foram: i) demonstrar, através de fundamentação teórica, que as distorções na análise de indicadores extraídos de demonstrações contábeis não corrigidas podem levar a decisões equivocadas, implicando prejuízos aos usuários da informação contábil, e ii) provar, através de investigação empírica, que os efeitos da inflação não devem ser ignorados, mesmo em ambientes com taxas reduzidas, quando da análise de rentabilidade e adequação de capital dos bancos no Brasil. Foram estabelecidas as seguintes hipóteses de pesquisa: i) os indicadores de rentabilidade legais dos bancos no Brasil são significativamente maiores que o os indicadores ajustados pelos efeitos da inflação, e ii) o índice da Basiléia legal dos bancos no Brasil é significativamente menor que o índice ajustado pelos efeitos da inflação. Para a investigação empírica do problema, selecionou-se uma amostra com os 50 maiores bancos comerciais por ativo para o período 1996-2002, e aplicou-se a técnica da correção monetária de balanço, em bases mensais, com a utilização do Índice Geral de Preços - Disponibilidade Interna. A fim de verificar se as distorções causadas pelos efeitos do reconhecimento da inflação apresentaram-se significativas, foram aplicados testes de hipóteses. A análise dos resultados permitiu rejeitar a hipótese de nulidade entre as diferenças de médias dos indicadores legais e ajustados, com um nível de significância de 1%, para todos os anos do período analisado. Baseando-se nesses resultados, foi possível confirmar as hipóteses da pesquisa. Constatou-se, ainda, que mesmo com uma inflação de apenas 1,71% em 1998, as diferenças encontradas foram consideradas estatiscamente significativas, ou seja, relevantes para a tomada de decisão. Portanto, provouse que os efeitos da inflação devem ser considerados quando da análise de rentabilidade e adequação de capital dos bancos no Brasil. Indiretamente, também foi possível explicitar que os bancos estão divulgando uma rentabilidade nominal maior que a real, e que há maior cobertura de riscos pelo capital próprio corrigido. Por fim, concluiu-se que, após o fim da exigência legal da correção monetária, o questionamento mínimo que todo usuário da informação contábil deve fazer refere-se à possibilidade de tomar decisões equivocadas, baseando-se na análise de indicadores extraídos de demonstrações contábeis não corrigidas. / The main objectives of this work were: i) to demonstrate, based on theoretical foundation, that the distortions in the analysis of ratios taken from financial statements computed according to corporate law misleads the decision making process, implying damages to accounting information users, and ii) to prove, by empirical research, that inflation effects must not be ignored, even in a low rate environment, when the profitability and capital adequacy of banks in Brazil are analyzed. The following hypotheses were formulated: i) the profitability ratios stemming from the so-called \"legal financial statements\" are significantly higher than those adjusted by inflation effects, and ii) Basel index also computed based on \"legal financial statements\" is significantly smaller than that adjusted by inflation effects. For the empirical research, a sample with the 50 major commercial banks, ranked by total assets for the period 1996-2002, was selected, and monetary restatement technique was applied, by the utilization of General Price Index - Internal Availability on a monthly basis. To verify whether the distortions were significant, hypotheses were statistically tested. The analysis of results allowed us to reject the null hypothesis between the means of legal and restated ratios, with a level of significance of 1%, for all the years within the analyzed period. It was still evidenced that, even with an inflation of only 1.71% in 1998, the differences found could be considered statistically significant, and therefore, relevant enough for the decision making process. The research hypotheses being confirmed, it was proved that inflation effects must be considered when analyzing the profitability and capital adequacy of banks in Brazil. Indirectly, it was also possible to state that banks are reporting a nominal profitability higher than the actual one and that there is a larger coverage of risks for the restated equity. Finally, it was concluded that the minimum questioning that every accounting information user should raise refers to the possibility of making wrong decisions, based on the analysis of ratios taken from financial statements not adjusted by inflation.

Os principais objetivos deste trabalho foram: i) demonstrar, através de fundamentação teórica, que as distorções na análise de indicadores extraídos de demonstrações contábeis não corrigidas podem levar a decisões equivocadas, implicando prejuízos aos usuários da informação contábil, e ii) provar, através de investigação empírica, que os efeitos da inflação não devem ser ignorados, mesmo em ambientes com taxas reduzidas, quando da análise de rentabilidade e adequação de capital dos bancos no Brasil. Foram estabelecidas as seguintes hipóteses de pesquisa: i) os indicadores de rentabilidade legais dos bancos no Brasil são significativamente maiores que o os indicadores ajustados pelos efeitos da inflação, e ii) o índice da Basiléia legal dos bancos no Brasil é significativamente menor que o índice ajustado pelos efeitos da inflação. Para a investigação empírica do problema, selecionou-se uma amostra com os 50 maiores bancos comerciais por ativo para o período 1996-2002, e aplicou-se a técnica da correção monetária de balanço, em bases mensais, com a utilização do Índice Geral de Preços - Disponibilidade Interna. A fim de verificar se as distorções causadas pelos efeitos do reconhecimento da inflação apresentaram-se significativas, foram aplicados testes de hipóteses. A análise dos resultados permitiu rejeitar a hipótese de nulidade entre as diferenças de médias dos indicadores legais e ajustados, com um nível de significância de 1%, para todos os anos do período analisado. Baseando-se nesses resultados, foi possível confirmar as hipóteses da pesquisa. Constatou-se, ainda, que mesmo com uma inflação de apenas 1,71% em 1998, as diferenças encontradas foram consideradas estatiscamente significativas, ou seja, relevantes para a tomada de decisão. Portanto, provouse que os efeitos da inflação devem ser considerados quando da análise de rentabilidade e adequação de capital dos bancos no Brasil. Indiretamente, também foi possível explicitar que os bancos estão divulgando uma rentabilidade nominal maior que a real, e que há maior cobertura de riscos pelo capital próprio corrigido. Por fim, concluiu-se que, após o fim da exigência legal da correção monetária, o questionamento mínimo que todo usuário da informação contábil deve fazer refere-se à possibilidade de tomar decisões equivocadas, baseando-se na análise de indicadores extraídos de demonstrações contábeis não corrigidas. / The main objectives of this work were: i) to demonstrate, based on theoretical foundation, that the distortions in the analysis of ratios taken from financial statements computed according to corporate law misleads the decision making process, implying damages to accounting information users, and ii) to prove, by empirical research, that inflation effects must not be ignored, even in a low rate environment, when the profitability and capital adequacy of banks in Brazil are analyzed. The following hypotheses were formulated: i) the profitability ratios stemming from the so-called \"legal financial statements\" are significantly higher than those adjusted by inflation effects, and ii) Basel index also computed based on \"legal financial statements\" is significantly smaller than that adjusted by inflation effects. For the empirical research, a sample with the 50 major commercial banks, ranked by total assets for the period 1996-2002, was selected, and monetary restatement technique was applied, by the utilization of General Price Index - Internal Availability on a monthly basis. To verify whether the distortions were significant, hypotheses were statistically tested. The analysis of results allowed us to reject the null hypothesis between the means of legal and restated ratios, with a level of significance of 1%, for all the years within the analyzed period. It was still evidenced that, even with an inflation of only 1.71% in 1998, the differences found could be considered statistically significant, and therefore, relevant enough for the decision making process. The research hypotheses being confirmed, it was proved that inflation effects must be considered when analyzing the profitability and capital adequacy of banks in Brazil. Indirectly, it was also possible to state that banks are reporting a nominal profitability higher than the actual one and that there is a larger coverage of risks for the restated equity. Finally, it was concluded that the minimum questioning that every accounting information user should raise refers to the possibility of making wrong decisions, based on the analysis of ratios taken from financial statements not adjusted by inflation.

Data mining is a multi-disciplinary field of science and technology widely used in developing predictive models and data visualization in various domains. Although there are numerous data mining algorithms and techniques across multiple fields, it appears that there is no consensus on the suitability of a particular model, or the ways to address data preprocessing issues. Moreover, the effectiveness of data mining techniques depends on the evolving nature of data. In this study, we focus on the suitability and robustness of various data mining models for analyzing real financial data to identify financial restatements. From data mining perspective, it is quite interesting to study financial restatements for the following reasons: (i) the restatement data is highly imbalanced that requires adequate attention in model building, (ii) there are many financial and non-financial attributes that may affect financial restatement predictive models. This requires careful implementation of data mining techniques to develop parsimonious models, and (iii) the class imbalance issue becomes more complex in a dataset that includes both intentional and unintentional restatement instances. Most of the previous studies focus on fraudulent (or intentional) restatements and the literature has largely ignored unintentional restatements. Intentional (i.e. fraudulent) restatements instances are rare and likely to have more distinct features compared to non-restatement cases. However, unintentional cases are comparatively more prevalent and likely to have fewer distinct features that separate them from non-restatement cases. A dataset containing unintentional restatement cases is likely to have more class overlapping issues that may impact the effectiveness of predictive models. In this study, we developed predictive models based on all restatement cases (both intentional and unintentional restatements) using a real, comprehensive and novel dataset which includes 116 attributes and approximately 1,000 restatement and 19,517 non-restatement instances over a period of 2009 to 2014. To the best of our knowledge, no other study has developed predictive models for financial restatements using post-financial crisis events. In order to avoid redundant attributes, we use three feature selection techniques: Correlation based feature subset selection (CfsSubsetEval), Information gain attribute evaluation (InfoGainEval), Stepwise forward selection (FwSelect) and generate three datasets with reduced attributes. Our restatement dataset is highly skewed and highly biased towards non-restatement (majority) class. We applied various algorithms (e.g. random undersampling (RUS), Cluster based undersampling (CUS) (Sobhani et al., 2014), random oversampling (ROS), Synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) (Chawla et al., 2002), Adaptive synthetic sampling (ADASYN) (He et al., 2008), and Tomek links with SMOTE) to address class imbalance in the financial restatement dataset. We perform classification employing six different choices of classifiers, Decision three (DT), Artificial neural network (ANN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Random forest (RF), Bayesian belief network (BBN) and Support vector machine (SVM) using 10-fold cross validation and test the efficiency of various predictive models using minority class recall value, minority class F-measure and G-mean. We also experiment different ensemble methods (bagging and boosting) with the base classifiers and employ other meta-learning algorithms (stacking and cost-sensitive learning) to improve model performance. While applying cluster-based undersampling technique, we find that various classifiers (e.g. SVM, BBN) show a high success rate in terms of minority class recall value. For example, SVM classifier shows a minority recall value of 96% which is quite encouraging. However, the ability of these classifiers to detect majority class instances is dismal. We find that some variations of synthetic oversampling such as ‘Tomek Link + SMOTE’ and ‘ADASYN’ show promising results in terms of both minority recall value and G-mean. Using InfoGainEval feature selection method, RF classifier shows minority recall values of 92.6% for ‘Tomek Link + SMOTE’ and 88.9% for ‘ADASYN’ techniques, respectively. The corresponding G-mean values are 95.2% and 94.2% for these two oversampling techniques, which show that RF classifier is quite effective in predicting both minority and majority classes. We find further improvement in results for RF classifier with cost-sensitive learning algorithm using ‘Tomek Link + SMOTE’ oversampling technique. Subsequently, we develop some decision rules to detect restatement firms based on a subset of important attributes. To the best of our knowledge, only Kim et al. (2016) perform a data mining study using only pre-financial crisis restatement data. Kim et al. (2016) employed a matching sample based undersampling technique and used logistic regression, SVM and BBN classifiers to develop financial restatement predictive models. The study’s highest reported G-mean is 70%. Our results with clustering based undersampling are similar to the performance measures reported by Kim et al. (2016). However, our synthetic oversampling based results show a better predictive ability. The RF classifier shows a very high degree of predictive capability for minority class instances (97.4%) and a very high G-mean value (95.3%) with cost-sensitive learning. Yet, we recognize that Kim et al. (2016) use a different restatement dataset (with pre-crisis restatement cases) and hence a direct comparison of results may not be fully justified. Our study makes contributions to the data mining literature by (i) presenting predictive models for financial restatements with a comprehensive dataset, (ii) focussing on various datamining techniques and presenting a comparative analysis, and (iii) addressing class imbalance issue by identifying most effective technique. To the best of our knowledge, we used the most comprehensive dataset to develop our predictive models for identifying financial restatement.

The increase in the number of financial restatements in recent years has resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of market capitalization for restated companies. Prior literature does not differentiate between single and multiple restatements announcements. This research investigates the inter-relationships among multiple financial restatements, corporate governance, market microstructure and the firm's rate of return in the form of three essays by differentiating between single and multiple restatement announcement companies. First essay examines the stock performance of companies announcing the financial restatement multiple times. The postulation is that prior research overestimates the abnormal return by not separating single restatement companies from multiple restatement companies. This study investigates how market penalizes the companies that announce restatement more than once. Differentiating the restatement announcement data based on number of restatement announcements, the results support for non persistence hypothesis that the market has no memory and negative abnormal returns obtained after each of the restatement announcements are completely random. Second essay examines the multiple restatement announcements and its perceived resultant information asymmetry around the announcement day. This study examines the pattern of information asymmetry for these announcements in terms of whether the bid-ask spread widens around the announcement day. The empirical analysis supports the hypotheses that the spread does widen not only around the first restatement announcement day but around every subsequent announcement days as well. The third essay empirically examines the financial and corporate governance characteristics of single and multiple restatement announcements companies. The analysis shows that corporate governance variables influence the occurrence of multiple restatement announcements and can distinguish multiple restatements announcement companies from single restatement announcement companies.

本研究主要探討財務報表重編前後會計穩健性是否有顯著差異，以瞭解財務報表重編對會計穩健性之影響。本研究以1998年至2007年發生年報重編公司為研究樣本，以T檢定檢測重編前後財務報表穩健性是否具顯著差異，研究結果顯示，重編前財務報表穩健性顯著低於重編後財務報表，證實重編公司重編前財務報表採用較不穩健之會計。此外，本研究進一步探討公司治理與重編前後穩健性之關聯，發現經理人持股比愈高及總經理異動次數愈多，重編前財務報表穩健性顯著低於重編後財務報表。 / This study examines the effect of financial restatements on conservatism. I collect restatement samples from listed companies in Taiwan between 1998 and 2007 and use T-test to validate the hypothesis. The empirical results find that conservatism is significantly lower before the restatement. In addition, this study suggest that the higher managerial ownership and CEO change, the lower conservatism before the restatement.

In this study, I examine whether firms hire new CFOs with improved qualifications following a financial reporting failure and subsequently experiencing CFO turnover. Prior literature provides evidence that restating firms attempt to take remedial actions to restore their credibility and reputation. This study extends prior literature by testing whether the decision to hire a new CFO is a valued remedial action for restating firms. The empirical results show that restating firms are more likely to hire new CFOs with more accounting expertise and from external sources than non-restating firms are. The market reacts more favorably when restating firms hire a CFO with more relevant accounting expertise than the incumbent CFO. I also find that the improved qualifications of the new CFO mitigate the information risk generated by the restatement. This study contributes to the literature with the assertion that accounting expertise is a valuable attribute that firms consider when making hiring decisions for CFOs, especially those firms that issued a restatement. The results imply that replacing CFOs is a valued remedial action for restating firms. The improved qualifications of the new CFOs improve the information environment for restating firms and reduce perceived risk from investors.

This study examines the relationship between executives and their independent auditor to see if there is a conflict of interest in their interaction. This study was motivated by the meltdowns, partially caused by fraudulent accounting, of many public companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s and the consequent passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This study examines the variables of audit fees, fees for other services, and auditor tenure to see if they are connected with the occurrence of an SEC-prompted restatement. The results show no significant correlation between amount of fees and the likelihood of an SEC-prompted restatement but indicate a negative correlation between length of executive-auditor relationship and the occurrence of an SEC-prompted restatement.

Financial statement quality can directly affect investor confidence. Financial fraud is most through misstated financial reports, and even fraudulent misstatement may result from financial restatement. Well-functioning mechanisms can improve financial statement quality. In this study, the financial restatements from 2002 to 2008 were investigated to discuss the influences of operating performance, degree of earnings management and corporate governance mechanisms. The results reveal that the worse the operating performance, the more probability the financial restatements. It indicates that increasing earnings can cover up bad operation. It is further found that the financial restatements with worse operating performance will probably increase their restatement amounts. In the aspect of earnings management, the results show that the higher the degree of earnings management by discretionary accruals, the more probability the financial restatements. It is indicative of the manager use discretionary accruals to operate the earnings management in order to cover up their worse financial performance. But the verified result is not outstanding. It is also found that the financial restatements with higher degree of earnings management by discretionary accruals will probably increase their restatement amounts. Finally, the results can not prove whether the corporate governance mechanisms show that the financial restatements probably occur in the companies with CEO duality. Moreover, the results also can not prove whether the larger the board of directors, the higher their restatement amounts.