Relationship between Ultimate Ownership and Earnings Conservatism in listed Companies of Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

The conflict of interest between managers and stockholders is one of the salient matters in economics, finance and accounting. One of the ways for resolving this conflict is the timely loss recognition. Many factors have impact on timely loss recognition. In this paper, we investigated the effect of ownership structure on Earnings conservatism, and analyzed whether the extent of timely loss recognition shown by firms with a controlling owner for the purpose of decreasing the information asymmetries depends on 1) the ownership share of controlling owner and 2) the divergence between controlling owner's voting and cash flow rights. In this paper, we have used an extension of the regression proposed by Basu (1997) for analyzing the data and 56 companies during 2005-09 from database. In general, our results document a negative relationship between the ownership share of controlling owner and the level of earnings conservatism and this result is consistent with the reduction of external contracting. In addition, we also find a negative relationship between earnings conservatism and the divergence of controlling owner's voting and cash flow rights. By increasing this divergence, firm is confronted with higher costs of external contracting.

Keywords

• ownership structure
• cash flow rights
• conservatism