Managers’ Responses to the Announcement of K-IFRS 1116

This study examines a firm’s financial reporting strategy during the period after the K-IFRS No. 1116 was announced but before that standard is in effect. Lessees subject to K-IFRS, from 2019, in accordance with K-IFRS No. 1116, have to recognize their rights and obligations arising from all lease or rent contracts. Therefore, return on assets will decrease and debt ratio will increase under the circumstance where real business activities remain unchanged. Regarding this, we hypothesize that firms using lease or rent at a large scale would adjust earnings in advance of implementing K-IFRS No. 1116 and examine a firm’s ex-ante earnings management. We find that the degree of downward earnings management just before K-IFRS No. 1116 is implemented increases with lease usage. This result implies that managers concern on large time-series changes of financial ratios by the revision of the accounting standard and proactively adjust earnings downward, because comparative financial statements for the previous years are not restated. However, we find that ex-ante downward earnings management according to lease usage is not significant for firms with financial constraint. It shows that for financially constrained firms, the incentive to upward earnings management offset the opposite incentive, because stability indicators such as debt ratio are more important for financially constrained firms. Our findings suggest that managers attempt to mitigate the negative impact of the new accounting standard on reported numbers by ex-ante earnings management.