Ownership concentration and earnings quality of banks: Results from a cross-country analysis

Abstract

This research investigates the impact of ownership concentration on earnings quality of banks. Previous literature shows that ownership concentration reduces agency costs between property and management, resulting in higher quality and transparency of information, and thus on earnings quality. The reason why we focus on banks lies on the specific constraints and regulations to which financial institutions are subjected, and as well as the different incentives to earnings management activities from management and property. Thus, the main issue of our research is to understand whether ownership concentration has an impact on banks earnings quality. We used a sample of 6,323 bank-year observations, across 35 countries, over the period 2001-2016. In the paper three different regression models are adopted to measure earnings quality according to the existing literature: (1) earnings persistence, (2) cash flow predictability and (3) earnings management to just-meet-or-beat the prior year’s earnings. We used OLS and random effects estimations for model (1) and (2) and logistic estimations for the model (3). Our results show that ownership concentration improves earnings quality of banks; this is true for all three estimated models. Our findings support the idea that the higher the ownership control on management activity, the higher the quality of earnings.