The study examines whether the construction firms manage reported earnings to meet accomplishing their interest coverage ratios according to the Evaluation and Public Announcing System of the Contractor''s Construction Capacity.
After the year 2015, the domestic construction industry was imposed to adopt the interest coverage ratios because of the importance of solvency ratios. In this conditions, the managers of construction firms are willing to increase their earnings to take competitive advantage toward their own intention and discretion. It can be absolutely necessary for managers of construction firms to exercise earnings upward adjusting.
This study analyzes three hypotheses; 1) managers of construction firms increase their earnings to report a good interest coverage ratios 2) after the year 2015, managers of construction firms exercise an aggressive earnings management.
To test the hypotheses, the models include the discretionary accruals(DA) estimated by modified Jones model(Dechow et al., 1995) as the main dependant variables. Also the test models contains other control variables such as firm size(SIZE), debt ratio(DEBT), block-holders(BLOK), the ownership of foreign investors(FOR), audit opinion(OPIN), big auditors(BIG4), and capital market dummy variables(MKT).
This study shows the empirical results through statistical descriptive statistics, coefficient of correlation, mean difference analysis and the multiple regression tables. The test sample consists of 350 construction firm-year data, selected from the KRX listed companies of the fiscal year during 2012-2018.
The majority of hypotheses is accepted. These results imply that construction firms boost their earnings to meet the Evaluation and Public Announcing System of the Contractor''s Construction Capacity to get competitive advantage, and this result is shown after the 2015 because of changing from the current ratios to the interest coverage ratios.