3.1. Governance characteristics of firms with local shareholders
We begin our empirical analysis by examining whether firm characteristics vary with distance to institutional
shareholders. We assign firms to one of five institutional distance quintiles at the end of each year and compute the equalweighted
average of a wide range of firm characteristics. The results for the extreme quintiles are presented in Table 2.
We find that firms that are geographically close to their ten largest institutional investors are less likely to engage in
earnings management than firms that are geographically farther away to their ten largest institutional investors. The mean
difference in the degree of earnings management between the extreme distance categories is 0.084, which is statistically
significant.
Further, we find that instances of option backdating are more prevalent when institutional shareholders are located
farther away. About 15% of firms in the lowest distance quintile have incidents of option backdating but in the highest
distance quintile, this proportion is significantly higher (¼20.50%). The firms in the lowest distance quintile also have
lower incidence of class action lawsuits (¼1.90%) and this proportion rises to 2.20% in the highest distance quintile. Taken
together, these mean estimates indicate that instances of corporate fraud are positively correlated with institutional
distance, perhaps because the intensity and effectiveness of monitoring declines with distance.