دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی نقش مالکیت دولتی بر کیفیت درآمد: شرکت های دولتی و خصوصی اروپایی - امرالد 2018

Abstract

Purpose: This paper examines the role of state ownership on financial reporting quality regarding the characteristics of conservatism and earnings management. Design/methodology/approach: Using a large sample of public and private European firms during the period 2003-2010, we test our hypotheses following Ball and Shivakumar´s (2005) model for conservatism and the modified Jones model (1991) proposed by Dechow and Sloan (1995) for earnings management. To ensure that our results are robust, we conduct sensitivity analysis with regard to potential endogeneity and selection bias. Findings: We find that state-owned firms are less conservative than non-state-owned firms, which is consistent with the idea that there is less need for accounting conservatism due to government protection. We also show that capital markets play an important role in shaping the relation between state ownership and earnings management. Among public firms, we find that state-owned firms have higher abnormal accruals and worse accruals quality than non-state-owned firms, which suggests that state-owned firms are not immune to capital market pressures. Originality: Our study contributes to the debate about state intervention in the corporate sector, extending the knowledge of the effects of government ownership on earnings quality by using a large sample of European firms. Furthermore, we also introduce the effect of capital market forces on managers’ behaviour in state-owned and non-state-owned companies by analysing private and publicly listed firms. Research limitations/implications: Our study has two limitations. First, as state-owned and non-state-owned firms face quite different incentive structures, management behaviour might be determined by factors that have yet to be identified. Second, prior research results suggest an inverted U-shape relation between ownership concentration and earnings management (Brown, 2006). It would be interesting to investigate the impact of different levels of state ownership on earnings quality. Practical implications: As our paper investigates the role of state ownership on earnings quality using a sample of European firms, it brings new insights regarding the role of state ownership in accounting quality and firm performance. In addition, it considers the role of capital markets in the relation between the quality of financial reporting and ownership by considering a sample with both public and private firms.

7. Conclusion

We examine the effect of state ownership on accounting quality using different dimensions of earnings quality and a sample of European firms in the 2003-2010 period. Our results suggest that SOEs are less conservative than non-SOEs, which is consistent with the debt contracting explanation for accounting conservatism and previous evidence that lenders of SOEs are less concerned with downside risk.

Results also suggest that capital markets play an important role in explaining the relation between state ownership and earnings management. Indeed, we find that private SOEs have lower levels of abnormal accruals and better accruals quality than private non-SOEs. We interpret this positive impact of state ownership on earnings quality in private firms as the result of lower earnings management incentives, mainly due to government implicit guarantees.

In contrast, among public firms, SOEs are more likely to have higher levels of abnormal accruals and worse accruals quality than non-SOEs. This finding is consistent with the idea that capital market forces put pressure on state-owned managers to meet performance benchmarks, thus creating incentives to manage earnings.