Investigating the relationship between Ownership Structure and Earning Management

The present study aims at investigating ownership structure on earning management. In earlier studies, the effects of factors related with corporate governance have been neglected. Thus Ownership structure, in the present paper has been classified into four categories: institutional ownership, corporate ownership, managerial ownership, and external ownership. As no data was found for foreign investor's ownership, thus this type of ownership was not investigated. A hypothesis was formulated for any of the other levels of ownership and its effect on earning management was investigated. For each of the hypotheses, a multiple linear regression model was used. The corporate accepted in Tehran stock exchange during the years 1383-1387 were the population of the study and the research sample consisted of 95 corporate. T-Test and multiple regression were used for the purpose of analyzing the hypotheses. The findings indicated that there is a significant negative correlation between institutional ownership and managerial ownership with earning management but there is a significant positive relationship between corporate ownership and earning management.