Asset impairment and corporate governance: evidence from the finance industry

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether asset impairment loss as stipulated in International Accounting Standards (IAS) No. 36 provides an opportunity for finance industry to engage in earnings management, and whether corporate governance mechanism can deter such behavior. Using a sample of Taiwan finance industry, our results show that the amounts of asset impairment losses are related to “income smoothing” incentive rather than “big bath” motive. We also find that directors/managers recognize asset impairment losses basing on self-interest consideration and corporate governance mechanism have significant effect on asset impairment decision. The result also shows that financial holding company recognizes less asset impairment losses than non-financial-holding financial institution. Our conclusions are robust to different model specification, and are free from multicollinearity and outliers effects. This study contributes to understand the asset impairment behavior of finance industry and the behavior differences between financial holding company and non-financial-holding financial institution.