We examine the relation between corporate governance and earnings quality for a large sample of firms worldwide. Corporate governance is a complex system of interrelated internal and external mechanisms, and earnings quality is not easy to measure. Therefore, we use two widely known corporate governance ratings (S&P Transparency and Disclosure Ranking and the ISS Corporate Governance Quotient), to measure overall corporate governance, and construct an aggregate ranking based on a wide range of earnings attributes in order to measure overall earnings quality.
We find a negative and statistically significant relation between corporate governance ratings and earnings quality rankings, suggesting that corporate governance and earnings quality are substitute mechanisms. The justification for this result would be the lesser need to invest in costly governance mechanisms for those firms that already offer high levels of earnings quality.
We also find that the country environment is the major determinant of firm-level corporate
governance variation. The levels of economic development and of investor protection in a country play an
important role in shaping the relation between corporate governance and earnings quality. There is a
negative relation between corporate governance ratings and earnings quality rankings in high economic
development and strong investor protection countries, but no relation in low economic development and
weak investor protection countries. Thus, corporate governance and earnings quality are substitute
mechanisms only in high-quality country environments. A plausible reason for this international
difference in behavior is that governance mechanisms are likely to be truly effective only in the more
developed countries in our sample. Therefore, the substitution effect between governance and earnings
quality would only make sense for firm from those countries. Consistent with our interpretation,
examination of the role of U.S. cross-listing indicates that corporate governance and earnings quality are
stronger substitutes in the case of cross-listing firms.
Overall, our results suggest that poorer earnings quality increases the demand for corporate
governance systems to mitigate information asymmetry and agency conflicts between managers and
shareholders. This substitute role for corporate governance and earnings quality suggests that strong
corporate governance standards can make up for poor earnings quality, which is consistent with the idea
that limitations of financial accounting information imply a demand for costly monitoring mechanisms.