A Study of Moderating Effect of Corporate Governance on the Relationship Between Earning Management and Earning Predictability in TSE

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

  Introduction
       Events such as corporate financial scandals of the world, Watergate and increasing uncertainty in the business environment have caused less investor confidence in accounting figures, and the ability to predict future performance of the business units in using historical data is reduced (Al-Dhamari & Ismail, 2013). This change has also led researchers to investigate the quality of earnings, including earnings predictability. Managers may tend to distort the financial statement, with some activities, including the earnings management of that judgment, discretion, and a variety of accounting methods that may reduce the earnings predictability. Given the inevitable handling of earnings management companies due to the agency cost, there are in financial literature other factors that can affect moderating the relationship. Corporate governance is one of the factors. As expected that decisions of managers to choose accounting methods and practices as well as control and monitoring mechanisms change according to the size of the company.
Methods
       The sample required for this research is taken from the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2008-2013. With restrictions, 121 companies have been analyzed using panel data analysis. Required information has been collected from Tadbirpardaz Company, Rahavard Novin Software and reports made by Stock Exchange Market and we have used Excel and Eviews7 software for the analysis. To test the research hypotheses, we used adjusted multivariate linear regression model of Al-Dhamari and Ismail 2013.
 
Results
       The first hypothesis results showed that earnings management has a negative impact on earnings predictability. The results of the second to sixth hypotheses show that corporate governance mechanisms have moderating effect on the relationship between earnings management and earnings predictability. Results for the seventh hypothesis showed that although the earnings predictability in small companies is larger than big companies, in large firms, moderating influence of corporate governance mechanisms is positive and in smalls firms it is negative.
 
Conclusion
       This results show that the management of opportunistic earnings in Iranian firms and financial reports has been distorted. Hypotheses two to six investigate the interaction of corporate governance mechanisms and earnings management on earnings predictability. In general, the results indicate a negative impact of earnings management on the earnings predictability, so some of the corporate governance mechanisms modify the negative impact of earnings management and some of these factors lead to its intensification. Seventh hypothesis investigated the interaction effect of corporate governance and earnings management on earnings predictability, considering the company size. The results show higher earnings predictability in small companies compared to the large companies. In other words, it is possible that earnings management is efficient since in large companies earnings predictability is reduced (opportunistic) and caused an increase of earnings predictability in small companies. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the implementation of the corporate governance in Iranian corporations may have less efficiency to enhance the quality of information.
 
Keywords: Earnings Predictability, Earnings Management, Corporate Governance Mechanisms, Firm Size.
 
 

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

 
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History

  • Receive Date: 21 December 2015
  • Revise Date: 13 December 2016
  • Accept Date: 08 May 2017

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