Does Ownership Structure Affect Jordanian Companies’ Tendency to Practice Earnings Management?

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of ownership structure on a firm’s ability to practice earnings management. To achieve this goal all 77th Jordanian industrial companies listed at Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the period 2000-2014 were selected resulting in 1089 firm-year observations. The empirical results suggest that the earnings management practices of Jordanian industrial companies listed at ASE are influenced by the ownership structure.  Precisely, the result shows that equity concentration, management ownership and institutional investor equity are associated inversely with the practices of earnings management. Our results are consistent with the Alignment of Interest Hypothesis and the Efficient Monitoring Hypothesis which suggest that large shareholders have less motivation to manipulate earnings, and can reduce the scope of managerial opportunism.