Determinants of the prevalence of special items in revenue and expense of Philippine listed firms: Purely accounting or economics?

• Main Authors: Alejandrino, Camille S.K., Chiu, Regine Mae P., Fernando, Ayra Mae S., Wong, Jazlynn Hannah C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2015
• Subjects: Financial statements > Philippines; Misleading financial statements > Philippines
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/7696
• Institution: De La Salle University

This paper explores the role of special items in the mismatching of revenues and expenses, and their causes- whether they are due to changes in accounting standards or occurrences of economic events- in selected publicly-listed firms in the Philippines. First, through careful examination of the revenue-expense relationship, this paper identifies periods which have exhibited cases of mismatching. Second, it determines the role of special items in the mismatch by analyzing the relationship of individual special items to revenues. Then, this paper looks into the effect of individual economic events and changes in accounting standards in the prevalence of special items, and explores possible relationships between these variables. Lastly, this paper divides sample firms into two industry categories and analyzes industrys GDP contribution to determine which industry is more vulnerable to economic events. In exploring the causes and relationships, theoretical explanations and empirical analysis were used. Specifically, financial statements of 112 publicly-listed firms in the Philippines were examined for quantitative data, thereby shedding a noteworthy breakthrough on Philippine corporate environment in the midst of a Western-oriented body of literature on mismatching and special items. Using multiple regression analyses, this study identified mismatching across all time periods covered by the study, with special items being one of the causes of mismatching, specifically liability extinguishment, which were mostly caused by economic events, specifically mergers and acquisitions. Using Chi-Square tests of independence, this study discovered that on an aggregate level, industry categories do not affect the number of economic events experienced. Lastly, using Wilcoxon Mann-Whitney and Binomials Tests, this study determined that there is an indeterminate relationship between changes in accounting standards and economic events.