نقش پیچیده درگیری های خانوادگی در مدیریت درآمد The complex role of family involvement in earnings management

1. Introduction This study combines three strands of research (family business, accounting, and corporate governance) by investigating whether family involvement and the characteristics of boards of directors and committees in terms of members’ expertise and experience affect accounting choices. Our research is motivated by the expansion of the family business field, by the importance of earnings management studies in the financial accounting field, and by the growing number of corporate governance studies addressing the outcomes that certain board and committee characteristics generate regarding firm performance, firm value, and financial reporting quality, among other factors. Family ownership is likely to be concentrated in the hands of families (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 1999), reducing the traditional agency problem (type I agency conflicts) of ownership and control (Fama & Jensen, 1983; Jensen & Meckling, 1976). However, traditional principal-agent problems in family firms lead to principal–principal conflicts (type II agency conflicts) (Singla, Veliyath, & George, 2014), in which the dominant family owner can extract the firm’s wealth to the detriment of minority shareholders (Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2006; Morck & Yeung, 2003), manipulate earnings out of self-interest (Fan & Wong, 2002), or reap private benefits (Villalonga & Amit, 2006). Family firms’ governance practices might face additional complications or barriers regarding the selection of adequate professionals, while ensuring the preferential treatment of next-generation family members (Pérez-González, 2006). In this scenario, family members, long-tenured family accountants, and even close friends often constitute a majority on the board. Recruiting family-proximate professionals can lead to several distortions in the management and control of firms, giving rise to bargained skepticism because of excessively emotional bonds (Gomez-Mejia, Cruz, Berrone, & De Castro, 2011; Gomez-Mejia, Cruz, & Imperatore, 2014) with the firm and strong dependence on the firm’s financial results. In contrast, outsiders bring the sets of skills and knowledge required to enforce financial reporting quality. Prior studies have shown that financial expertise and experience can foster monitoring activities (Kim, Mauldin, & Patro, 2014), resulting in lower earnings management (Krishnan & Visvanathan, 2008). To date, only a niche area within the literature has explored earnings management in family business settings, and the results have been inconclusive since family firms have been associated with both reduced (Ali, Chen, & Radhakrishnan, 2007; Wang, 2006) and with greater (Chi, Hung, Cheng, & Tien Lieu, 2015; Razzaque, Ali, & Mather, 2016) earnings management. Furthermore, the association between family firms and earnings management has been extensively explored with regard to public firms, while private firms have received relatively little attention (Kvaal, Langli, & Abdolmohammadi, 2012). Additionally, prior research into the intersection between the family business and earnings management fields has not considered the roles played by the characteristics of C-suite members. Finally, prior studies have primarily focused on objective management characteristics, such as the board’s or committee’s size, independence, and meeting frequency. For these reasons, the recent literature has argued that there remains much to explore about financial reporting in family firms (Songini, Gnan, & Malmi, 2013; Prencipe & Bar-Yosef, 2011).