Real Earning Management, Corporate Governance and Cash Holding

Abstract

Decreasing interest conflicts between stockholders and executives is thecorporate governance’s role and this is accentuated when managers perceivemotivations to deviate from the advantage of stockholders. Corporategovernance is likely to diminish profit management while improving theinvestors’ understanding of cash maintenance. This study aims atrecognizing relevance among real profit management and corporategovernance. To measure profit management, Recovery models (2006) andJenni (2010) and for measuring the relevance between cash maintenance andprofit management, modified models of Opler (1999) and Phama and Fringe(1998) have been deployed in this study. Percentage of non-obligatedmembers of executive board (executive board independence) has beenutilized as the substantial feature of corporate governance. As for testing thehypotheses, multi-variable linear regression model and integratedgeneralized least squares method were used. Considering the limitationsimposed in selection, statistical sampling of the study includes 90 acceptedcompanies in Tehran Stock Exchange that have undergone research between2008 and 2012. The findings indicate that there is a meaningful positiverelevance between real profit management and cash maintenance. Investorsdecrease cash maintenance in companies with high real profit managementand compared to businesses with strong corporate governance, weaker onespossess less evaluations of cash maintenance among those which performprofit management in its high levels.

Keywords

• real earning management
• corporate governance
• cash holding level
• cash holding evaluation
• executive board independence
• agencyissue