Time: 17 November (Wednesday) 19:00-20:30 pm

Venue: Tencent Conference [424 329 253

Speaker: Associate Professor Jia Ning, Tsinghua University

Speaker profile.

Jia Ning is an associate professor and PhD supervisor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management. He received his PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business in the United States, is a national accounting leader of the Ministry of Finance, and holds the position of Director of the Chinese Enterprise Globalization Research Center at Tsinghua University. He has published several papers in Management Science, Journal of Corporate Finance, Accounting Research, Finance Research, Nankai Management Review and other important academic journals at home and abroad. He has authored many cases including Baidu, eBay, Xinxing Casting, Beyondsoft and Peking University People's Hospital, among which more than 30 English cases have been included in the Harvard Business School Case Library and Stanford Business School Case Library. Meanwhile, Associate Professor Jia Ning is the author of the superb bestseller in the field of finance and economics, Jia Ning's Financial Lectures - The Financial Thinking Everyone Needs (released by CITIC Publishing House in 2020), and was also the host of CCTV International Channel (CGTN)'s New Money from 2016-2018.

Brief report content.

There has been a wide corporate adoption of business intelligence (BI) system, a modern digital tool that provides managers with operational insights based on big data analytics. In this paper, we examine whether the adoption of BI induces real earnings management. Using a sample of standard and Poor (S&P) 1500 firms over the period of 2005-2018, we find that corporate adoption of BI is associated with higher levels of real earnings management. The effect is stronger for firms whose CEO has greater incentives to manage earnings, for firms with greater operational complexity, and in more recent years when BI’s analytical capability becomes increasingly powerful, but weaker for firms operating in turbulent environments and for firms with poor data management capability. Further analyses indicate that BI adoption increases the likelihood of meeting or just beating analyst forecasts and reduces the negative impact of real earnings management on future performance. Overall, the findings of this study suggest a dark side of BI – how firms use analytics tools to alter business activities for strategic reporting purpose.

(Organised by: Department of Accounting, Centre for Research and Academic Communication)