Three essays on Earnings Management Evidence from UK

Abstract

The first essay researches the impact of the board characteristics on earnings management. Earnings management is a dependent variable and a proxy for discretionary accruals, which is predicted by applying three discretionary accruals models that include Jones model, modified Jones model and Kothari model. Independent variables comprise of board characteristics. The sample comprised of all listed companies on FTSE-350 from 2007 to 2018. Based on the results and findings of the Jones model, modified Jones model Kothari model and earnings management model, this research study provides empirical evidence proving the impact of the board size, board independence and gender diversity on the earnings management which is shown to be negative, implying larger boards with higher number of independent directors and female directors are in a better position to oversee the management activities and ensure higher quality of financial information. However, the impact of the CEO duality and board activity on earnings management is positive, illustrating that boards in which both positions CEO and board chairman are holding by one person and the board meets more frequently loses its control over necessary practices such as controlling earnings management. The prime objective of second research study is to study and understand the impact of the audit committee characteristics on the discretionary accruals in the companies listed on FTSE 350 from 2007 to 2018. The chosen period important because, the chosen period provides a window to test the Smith Report’s recommendations for audit committees following the issue of the UK Code and to understand to what extent; the recommended characteristics of the audit committee can help the companies to improve the quality of financial reporting. In this research study, earnings management is a dependent variable, whereas audit committee characteristics comprise of independent variables that include audit committee size (ACS), audit committee independence (ACI), members on the audit committee having a background in accounting or finance or both (ACFEX) and the frequency of the audit committee meetings during a year (NACM). The empirical findings of the relationship between earnings management and audit committee characteristics show that ACS is negatively associated to earnings management, ACI is positive related to earnings management, ACFXP and earnings management are negative related, and the number of audit committee meetings (NACM) is negatively related to earnings management. Third essay empirically tests the impact of the CEO’s and executive’s compensation on the discretionary accruals. To better understand the relationship of the CEO’s and executive’s compensation with discretionary accruals, the entire compensation is decomposed, and the impact of each component of the total compensation is tested on the discretionary accruals. Earnings management is the dependent variable, which is the proxy for the discretionary accruals. The components of the CEO’s and executive’s compensation are independent variables, which include the CEO’s total compensation, executive total compensation, CEO’s equity-based compensation, executive’s equity-based compensation, CEO’s salary, executive’s salary, CEO’s bonus, executive’s bonus, CEO equity to total compensation ratio and executive’s equity to total compensation ratio. For this, a sample comprising of all listed companies on FTSE 350 is used. The sample period is from 2007 to 2018 and employs the annual data because most of the companies prepare and publish their financial statements annually. The empirical results and findings of this research study show that the CEO equitybased compensation, CEO bonus, CEO equity-based compensation to total compensation ratio, executive’s equity-based compensation, executive’s salary and executive’s equity-based compensation to total compensation ratio are positively related to earrings management, whereas, CEO total compensation, CEO salary, executive total compensation and executive’s bonus are negatively related with the earnings management.