Given that debenture issuing companies could have incentives to increase their level of earnings management in the issuing period, hypothesis 2 aimed to verify which stage this increase would occur in.
H2: Debenture issuing companies exhibit a greater level of positive earnings management at the time preceding the issue, compared with non-issuing ones.
Considering that debenture issuing companies may exhibit a greater level of EM in one of the issue phases, hypothesis 3 aimed to identify which company characteristic variables (size, sales growth, ROA, leverage) could explain this greater level of EM.
H3: Debenture issuing companies exhibit different financial and operational characteristics at the time preceding the issue, compared to non-issuing ones.
In the end, the sample was composed of 180 companies, with 121 non-issuing companies and 59 debentures issuing companies.
For example, the average size of the issuing companies is 14.
2% of issuing companies contracted one of the market leaders (big four), against 31.
When the sample is divided into issuing and non-issuing companies, the following difference stands out: earnings management in issuing companies varies from 3.
Table 4 indicates that the average level of earnings management in the pre-issue period is much higher for issuing companies, varying from 1.
This result highlights that there is no statistically significant difference, in terms of EM, between the sample of debenture issuing companies and non-issuing ones.
If the debenture issuing dummy variable exhibits statistical significance, there would be a model selection problem, since it would not be possible to infer whether the issuing companies exhibit a higher or lower level of EM due to issuing, or because they already exhibit different levels of EM to the non-issuing ones, over time.
Table 6 presents the estimates for the model, which includes the debenture issuing phases as explanatory variables to capture in which phase earnings management is greater for issuing companies, in relation to non-issuing ones.
