An Empirical Study On The Effects Of The Ownership Structure Of Listing Corporations On Earnings Management

Principal-agent relationship is the product of enterprise system that two rights of ownership and managerial authority are separated, with the gradual development of China’s capital market, the problem of earnings management is gradually revealed. Earnings management is a series of behaviors, that refers to the listed companies to gloss over the current financial report through the change of accounting method or use of real trading activity, thus misleading the external users of financial report information objectively to evaluate the company’s operating performance, and impacting the relevant contracts that based on accounting earnings. Earnings management affect the authenticity and rationality of corporate financial reporting, and the important influence factors and origin of earnings management is the company’s internal governance, ownership structure is considered as the basis of corporate governance, ownership structure as part of ownership structure, the large shareholder control, equity balance degree and institutional investor shareholding has an inseparable relationship with earnings management. Therefore, this paper respectively from the large shareholder control, equity balance degree as well as institutional investors shareholding three aspects to study the influences of ownership structure on earnings management.Earnings management can be divided into two parts, that is, the accrual earnings management and real earnings management, compared with accrued earnings management, the risk of real earnings management is smaller and the concealment is better. On the one hand, the study of real earnings management is started earlier on abroad, while China started relatively late, and literature about the study of the two together are less. On the other hand, with the gradual improvement of related system and the continuous strengthening of supervision, accrued earnings management that can be implemented space gradually narrowing, more companies will choose to implement real earnings management. Through the study of this article, which is beneficial to rich the related theory of earnings management, and facilitating the information users understand the correlation between ownership structure and earnings management, and improving the ability of users to identify the authenticity of the report information, which can supervise listed companies actively to disclose the financial information that can reflect their true operating conditions, therefore, it has a certain theoretical and practical significance to study the impact of ownership structure on earnings management through the empirical study method.The paper combined normative research method with empirical research method, using the relevant data of China’s A shares of listing Corporation from 2012 to 2014 as the research sample, using the model of modified Jones to measure earnings management, the paper drew on the research of Roychowdhury and Cohen et al., respectively from three aspects to study,that is the sales control, production control and discretionary expenditure control, and with the comprehensive results to measure the real earnings management behavior, and introduces the Shapley power index to measure major shareholders control, respectively with the major shareholder control, equity balance degree and institutional investors shareholding as independent variables, with accrual earnings management and real earnings management as the dependent variable in in the empirical test. For how can restrain the phenomenon of earnings management and improve the quality of earnings information, the paper puts forward the corresponding policy recommendations from perfecting relevant laws and regulations and building a reasonable ownership structure, and generalizes the deficiency of this study.The results of the study show that: the higher of the major shareholder control and the stronger of equity balance degree, the higher of the accrual and real earnings management level; the higher the stake of institutional investors, the stronger inhibitory effect on real earnings management behavior, but there is no significant impact on the accrual earnings management behavior.