The Rate Regulation and the Relationship between Stock prices and Earnings

本文主要研究了核电站的退役成本和乏燃料的回收成本。我们考察了哪些激励因素会影响年度中这些费用的自由裁量计量，并调查自由裁量成分是否与价值相关。首先，为了平滑营业利润的不确定波动，对年度内的回收费用进行了任意确定，而退役费用不用于平滑收入。如果为了平滑收益而在期间内任意分配一些应计项目，则这些应计项目的任意增加（即当期收益的储蓄）将向投资者传达管理者对业绩的悲观预测。第二，与上述假设一致，自由裁量回收费用与价值相关，其系数为负。且与未来一年的营业利润呈负相关。这些证据表明，回收费用的价值相关性与未来绩效的决定因素和预测能力是一致的。第三，退役费用和回收费用都没有降低盈余质量。我们找不到证据来支持反复提出的批评，即基于管理自由裁量权计量费用的机会必定会削弱会计信息的有用性。

This research focuses on the decommissioning cost and the recycle cost of used nuclear fuel, which are incurred by nuclear power plant. We examine what incentive factors affect the discretionary measurement of those expenses in the year and investigate whether the discretionary components are value relevant. First, the recycle expenses in the year is discretionally determined in order to smooth the uncertain fluctuations in operating profits, while the decommissioning expenses is not utilized for income smoothing. If some accruals were discretionally allocated inter-period for the purpose of income smoothing, the discretionary increase in those accruals (i.e. savings of earnings in current period) would communicate the manager's pessimistic forecasts on the performance to investors. Second, as consistent with the above hypothesis, the discretionary recycle expenses is value relevant and the coefficient on them is negative. Moreover, it is negatively related to the one-year ahead operating profits. These evidences imply that the value relevance of the recycle expenses is consistently estimated with the determinants and the predictive power of future performance. Third, both the decommissioning expenses and the recycle expenses do not deteriorate the quality of earnings. We cannot find the evidence supporting the repeated criticism that the opportunity to measure expenses based on managerial discretion must diminish the usefulness of accounting information.