results
in this section,we present the results of the regression analysis. we first report the descriptive statistics and correlation results in section 4.1. this is followed in section 4.2 by a presentation of the regression results.
descriptive statistic and correlation matrix
table 2 presents a summary of the descriptive statistics of the dependent and independent variables.
table 2 shows that the mean income strategy is 71.0 per cent. this suggests that listed companies in Tanzania adopt more income-increasing accounting policies than income-decreasing accounting policies. this is consistent with positive accounting theory and agency theory which argues that managers choose accounting methods to maximize their utility. we therefore view these findings as a reflection of managerial opportunism and weak corporate governance mechanisms. Even though the percentage of non-executive directors is very high at 76.28 per cent, the non-executive directors may not be knowledgeable enough about the company's business to monitor managers effectively. as noted by the DSE Handbook (2008), companies in Tanzania rely heavily on debt-financing. the mean leverage ratio of 2.93 means that the amount of debt is more than double the amount of equity; however, there seems to be high investment of retained earnings by the companies. The mean internal financing is about 45.32 per cent of total net assets, which is significant, suggesting that a significant amount of profits is distributed as dividends.
The person correlations are presented in table 3. We use the correlation matrix to determine whether the independent variables are highly correlated. Table 3 shows that there is little correlation among most of the independent variables as the highest correlation, -0.633, is less than the benchmark of 0.7, suggesting that the problem of multicollinearity is not serious.