The Empirical Researeh On The Relationship Between The Corporate Governance Structure Of Listed Companies And Real Earnings Management

Earnings management, being as an emphasis of the empirical accounting researches nowadays, has an increasingly significant influence on the stakeholders of listed companies as well as on the capital market. It has been widely accepted that there exists a close relationship between earnings management and the corporate governance structure, one important reason is that the former, which represents the particular empirical accounting research, is brought by the "principal-agent problem" caused by the separation of two powers, while the latter is an arrangement system that coordinates the two-right-separation problem, improving the corporate governance structure surly can effectively constraint the earnings management behavior of the company. Therefore, this article will regard corporate governance structure as a starting point and study the relationship between earnings management and corporate governance structure.Most researches before focus on accruals earnings management, which adjusts and manipulates accrued items, while in2006our country promulgates a new accounting standards, more and more listed companies turn to choose real earnings management to adjust earnings, it creates some real-existed activities that corporate can control and they have an influence on the surplus. Unlike accrual earnings management only changes the period of cash flow, real earnings management will be potentially harmful to the long-term value of the enterprise, and less possibilities to catch the attention of the auditors and regulatory authorities, as a result, real earnings management has a greater potential harm to the capital market. Therefore, studying the relationship between real earnings management and corporate governance structure of Chinese listed companies, we can restrain earnings management by improving the corporate governance, and a positive effect will be occurred in Chinese capital market.This article will do the research from three aspects of corporate governance structure---ownership structure, characteristics of BOD (board of directors), and characteristics of the BOS (board of supervisors), studying their relationship with real earnings management one by one. Based on the model of Roychowdury, we can estimate the level of real earnings management of those listed companies, and do a linear regression analysis on their relationship with some important indexes of the corporate governance structure on that basis, and then draw conclusions. Through the empirical research, we obtain the following conclusions:among the indexes of the ownership structure, the proportion of state-owned shares, the proportion of corporate shares, and the ownership concentration have positive correlations with the real earnings management; among the indexes of the characteristics of BOD, the board size and the proportion of independent directors have positive correlations with the real earnings management, while whether the chairman and the general manager are syncretic has a negative but not very significant correlation with the levels of real earnings management; among the characteristic of BOS, the size of BOS has a insignificant positive correlation with the real earnings management.