Environmental Provisions as an Earnings Management Tool: Some Canadian Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the measurement and recognition of environmental provisions by industrial corporations. It is argued that executives set such provisions to : 1) smooth out volatility in reported earnings, 2) minimize debt and failure contractual costs, 3) manage a firm’s political visibility (media exposure). The sample comprises Canadian firms from the forest products, mining and metals and petroleum products industries with data covering the 1990-1996 period. Our main findings are the following. First, environmental provisions are used to smooth out fluctuations in reported earnings. Second, politically sensitive firms tend to report higher environmental provisions than other firms. However, debt and failure contractual costs do not seem to affect the measurement of environmental provisions. However, environmental provisions are useful for stock market valuation. These findings have implications for other countries that are considering the adoption of such provisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".