Effects of corporate governance on management earnings: Study based on non-financial firms in Pakistan

Abstract

Corporate governance is an important mechanism to control earnings management. The objective of our research is to investigate the impact of corporate governance on earnings management along with some control variables. We used secondary and panel data of 159 non-financial firms and the time period we covered was from 2010 to 2019. We applied different techniques like descriptive statistics, correlation matrix, multicollinearity, and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) for data analysis. This investigation found that there is a significant and negative impact of audit quality, audit committee size, audit committee activities on earnings management, while CEO duality has a positive and significant impact on earnings management. We also found a significant and negative impact of asset tangibility and profitability or earnings management; however, there is no effect of board size and sales growth on the earnings management.