The Relationship Between the Deviation of Institutional Investors' Attention and Earnings Management

One of the most essential items of financial statements is the reported earnings because the users of financial statements use the reported earnings as an indicator to evaluate performance and determine the company's value. Therefore, investors and users of financial statements pay special attention to reported earnings to make decisions. Company managers have incentives to manipulate the reported earnings due to agency issues. One of the mechanisms to control the opportunistic behavior of managers is the presence of institutional investors. In corporate governance, institutional investors play a vital role, so it can be said that their existence is critical due to their supervisory role in controlling the opportunistic behavior of the management. Institutional investors own a significant percentage of companies' shares, so they have high incentives to allocate time and resources to monitor the decisions of companies' management. Institutional investors are facing limited attention due to having a large number of shares of different companies, and considering that attention is considered a resource in limited supply, companies, even in the presence of institutional investors, get involved in earnings management. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between the deviation of institutional investors' attention and the earnings management of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange, and if there is a meaningful relationship, specify the direction of the relationship. The current research is practical in terms of purpose and correlation and post-event method to collect data from Rahavard Novin 3 software and the Tehran Stock Exchange Organization website to classify data from Excel software and for testing purposes. The hypotheses have been used in Eviews software. Considering that this research uses the real data of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), its results can be generalized to the research community. This study used the systematic elimination method to select the research sample. Four hypotheses of this research were tested by collecting data from 132 companies listed on the TSE from 2011 to 2020. The assumptions of the research are:H1: There is a positive and significant relationship between the deviation of the attention of institutional investors and earnings management based on accruals.H2: There is a positive and significant relationship between the deviation of institutional investors' attention and real earnings management based on abnormal production costs.H3: There is a positive and significant relationship between the deviation of institutional investors' attention and real earnings management based on unusual discretionary costs.H4: A positive and significant relationship exists between the deviation of institutional investors' attention and real earnings management based on abnormal operating cash. Dechow et al. (1995) model has been used to measure discretionary accruals, and Richaudrey's (2006) model has been used to measure real earnings management. The results of the research hypothesis test respectively showed a positive and significant relationship between the deviation of institutional investors' attention and accrual-based earnings management, real earnings management based on surplus production, abnormal discretionary expenses, and abnormal operating cash. In other words, when an unusual event temporarily diverts the attention of the companies' institutional investors, the companies' managers take advantage of this opportunity and become more involved in managing accrual and actual earnings. The findings of the present research with Garel et al. (2021) are consistent. The research results showed that the intensity of monitoring applied by institutional investors on earnings management methods does not uniquely depend on the level of institutional ownership but also depends on the deviation of investors' attention. Investors sometimes neglect aspects related to the economic environments they face, such as the strategic motivations of companies to manipulate earnings. At the same time, the research findings showed that the intensity of capital monitoring institutional investors on earnings management may temporarily reduce and weaken the relationship between institutional investor ownership and earnings management. The diversity and breadth of institutional investors' stock portfolios have to be exposed to attention limitations, and this factor prevents the simultaneous and uniform monitoring of the earnings management of all companies in the stock portfolio of institutional investors. Considering the results obtained from the research, it is suggested to institutional investors that in the case of abnormal returns, they should not focus all their attention on the industries that have experienced positive or negative abnormal returns. They should not neglect to control the opportunistic behavior of managers of investment companies so that the opportunity to manipulate earnings figures is denied to all managers.