Institutional Environment, Characteristics Of Top Managers And Earnings Management

Earnings management has always been a hot topic at home and abroad.The accounting information of listed companies is an important source of information for investors' decisions.The quality of accounting information affects the healthy operation of the capital market.In recent years,the financial scandals of listed companies in China have continued one after another.It has been far from the previous years of the 1990 s,such as Qiongminyuan and Yinguangxia,and the recent cases of Zhangzidao and Hubeiyihua have continuously exposed accounting frauds and severely affected the capital market which maintain sustained and healthy development.Under the modern enterprise system,the company's operating rights and ownership are separated,and the management team with control rights manipulates earnings based on self-interest.With the demographic studies gradually applied to management,domestic and foreign scholars have also begun to study corporate earnings management behavior from the perspective of managers' background characteristics in recent years.Institutional environment is the basis for the stable operation of the market,while China's economic development is rapid,and there are regional imbalances in the characteristics of development.The differences in the external environment prompt executives to manage earnings in varying degrees.The features of senior management and institutional environment are important factors affecting earnings management.This paper discusses the influence of the characteristics of top managers on the accrual-based earnings management,and combines the actual situation in China to examine the relationship between characteristics of top managers and accrual-based earnings management in different institutional environments.This paper takes the data of A-share listed manufacturing companies from 2012 to 2016 as the research sample,measures the accrual-based earnings management with the modified Jones model which universally accepted in the academic community,and based on the Upper Echelons Perspective,Taking the gender,age,academic qualification and term of office as the characteristics of top managers.From the report on marketization index researched by Wang Xiaolu and Fan Gang,the government and laws environment are used to measure the institutional environment.By empirically studying the relationship among the institutional environment,the characteristics of top management teams and accrual-based earnings management.The study found that the gender,average age,and average tenure of top management teams are negatively related to the accrual-based earnings management,and the average academic qualifications of top management team is positively related to the accrual-based earnings management;government intervention is positively related to the accrual-based earnings management,and law environment is negatively related to the accrual-based earnings management;institutional environment negatively regulates the relationship between the average age of senior management teams and accrual-based earnings management,institutional environment negatively regulates the relationship between the average tenure and accrued earnings management;The institutional environment has not played a regulatory role in the relationship between gender and accrual-based earnings management;The institutional environment has not played a regulatory role in the relationship between average academic qualifications and accrual-based earnings management.Therefore,a reasonable allocation of gender structure,age structure,education structure and tenure structure of the senior management team,as well as reducing government intervention and creating a good law environment can more effectively curb earnings management behavior and improving the quality of accounting information.