Institutional Investors, Real Earnings Management and Cost of Equity: Evidence from Listed High-tech Firms in China

Han Gao, Zhuyi Shen, Yichen Li, Xuxin Mao and Yukun Shi

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 2020, vol. 56, issue 14, 3490-3506

Abstract: This paper investigates the association between real earnings management and the cost of equity from the perspective of the heterogeneity of institutional investors. Based on a sample of publicly listed high-tech firms in China from 2008 to 2017, our empirical results suggest that there is a significant negative correlation between earnings management and the cost of equity capital. This finding is contrary to previous conclusion, indicating that, in China, real earnings management cannot be effectively identified by external investors, and the company could easily obtain financing from the capital market and reduce its cost of equity due to its masked excellent performance by manipulating the real earnings management. Furthermore, we find that compared with transient institutional investors, stable institutional investors with the intention of holding the stock for the long-term can effectively reduce the cost of equity. Our results also show that real earnings management under the supervision of stable institutional investors could be more easily identified by shareholders and stable institutional investors could diminish the impact of earnings management on the cost of equity.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1540496X.2019.1650348 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:emfitr:v:56:y:2020:i:14:p:3490-3506

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MREE20

DOI: 10.1080/1540496X.2019.1650348

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().