Recent governance initiatives in Canada have underlined the need for more evidence on
the corporate governance and the quality of reporting issues. The purpose of this study
is to provide early evidence to assess the merit of calls for stringent governance
regulations in Canada by examining the association between the quality of overall and
specific governance features and the quality of accounting earnings.
We use absolute value of performance-matched abnormal accruals and
return-earnings association as the proxies for quality of earnings. Using results
from recently published data on corporate governance for a sample of Canadian firms,
we find that overall governance quality is inversely related to the level of abnormal
accruals and positively associated with the return-earnings association, suggesting
that good corporate governance mechanisms provide greater monitoring of the
financial accounting process and ensure more informative accounting earnings. We
also find that governance attributes do not affect the quality of earnings equally.
Specifically, the magnitude of abnormal accruals is negatively associated with the level
of independence of board composition, the extent of alignment of management
compensation with interests of shareholders and the strength of shareholder rights.
The results from the returns and earnings analysis are consistent with these findings.
Overall, this study provides early evidence that is consistent with Canadian
regulators’ initiatives that stronger corporate governance mechanisms may be
important factors in improving the integrity of financial reporting for Canadian firms.
Since Canadian regulators adopted a set of corporate governance rules which are
similar to some provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the SEC and various stock
exchange listing standards around the world, the evidence in the paper suggests that
future policy initiatives in the USA and other countries should reinforce the need for
independent boards, effective management compensation and stronger shareholders’
rights, which is likely to result in better earnings quality.
This study has several limitations. First, like many empirical studies that rely on
disclosed proxy data, proxy disclosures may not represent all aspects of corporate
governance practices. It is possible that some companies may have strong practices in
some areas, but received lower scores because the details are not disclosed in their
proxies. In addition, the sampling process may suffer from survivorship bias[14].
Third, the tests in this study are association tests, and thus do not directly distinguish
whether the structural change in the association between the proxies for earnings
quality and governance characteristics is due to the enhancement of governance or the
associated pressure for increased managerial accountability. Future research may need
to adopt qualitative research approaches to provide collaborative evidence on the link
between quality of financial reporting and governance effectiveness