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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of state ownership on financial reporting quality regarding the characteristics of conservatism and earnings management.

Using a large sample of public and private European firms during the period 2003-2010, the authors test the hypotheses following Ball and Shivakumar’s (2005) model for conservatism and the modified Jones (1991) model proposed by Dechow and Sloan (1995) for earnings management. To ensure that the results are robust, the authors conduct sensitivity analysis with regard to potential endogeneity and selection bias.

The authors find that state-owned firms are less conservative than non-state-owned firms, which is consistent with the idea that there is less need for accounting conservatism due to government protection. The authors also show that capital markets play an important role in shaping the relation between state ownership and earnings management. Among public firms, the authors find that state-owned firms have higher abnormal accruals and worse accruals quality than non-state-owned firms, which suggests that state-owned firms are not immune to capital market pressures.

The study has two limitations. First, as state-owned and non-state-owned firms face quite different incentive structures, management behavior might be determined by factors that have yet to be identified. Second, prior research results suggest an inverted U-shape relation between ownership concentration and earnings management (Ding et al., 2007). It would be interesting to investigate the impact of different levels of state ownership on earnings quality.

As the paper investigates the role of state ownership on earnings quality using a sample of European firms, it brings new insights regarding the role of state ownership in accounting quality and firm performance. In addition, it considers the role of capital markets in the relation between the quality of financial reporting and ownership by considering a sample with both public and private firms.

The study contributes to the debate about state intervention in the corporate sector, by extending the knowledge of the effects of government ownership on earnings quality by using a large sample of European firms. Furthermore, the authors also introduce the effect of capital market forces on managers’ behavior in state-owned and non-state-owned companies by analyzing private and publicly listed firms.

State ownership has been common especially in industries with restricted competition. In Russia, state-controlled firms represent around 41 percent of the market value of all listed firms (Deloitte, 2015). Yet, there is a significant gap in the literature regarding the effects of various forms of government control in listed firms. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by exploring the impact of the complexity of state ownership and competition on the performance of Russian listed firms.

The sample consists of data for 72 firms (360 firm-years) in the Russian MOEX broad market index during 2011–2015. The complexity of state ownership is captured by studying forms of state control including majority/minority, direct/indirect, federal/regional, mixed structures and golden shares.

The authors find significant differences in performance relating to different forms of state ownership. State control is negatively related to firm valuation and the sales/employees ratio. Performance is weakest when state ownership takes the form minority, regional or direct ownership. State control through golden shares typically outperforms other state-controlled firms. The authors find indications of employment prioritization beyond the economical optimum. In addition, the relation between state ownership and profitability becomes positive in sectors where state firms appear to enjoy lower competition.

While the effects of state ownership have been studied on many markets, there is a lack of studies on the effects of different forms, or the complexity, of state ownership beyond direct and indirect ownership. The authors contribute to the literature on the performance effects of state ownership by studying a multitude of forms of governmental ownership as well as the role of competition in Russia. Especially the profitability of state-controlled firms is significantly affected by industry characteristics. Implications of the results are discussed both from firm and policy maker perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to examine bank performance using the different performance measures, namely, return on assets, return on equity and bank margins (MAR).

Unbalanced panel data were constructed to test the related hypotheses and provide evidence on the relationship between ownership types, banking models and performance indicators adopting the random effects techniques.

The findings of the paper substantiate that the banking models are significant performance indicators. However, the results are contingent on the GDP growth of the country. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the impact of ownership types is inconclusive in all measures of performance. However, the GDP is significant when it interacts with the types of ownership, particularly for foreign and government banks, although the evidence is mixed and unfavourable for government banks.

The results of the study provide insights for bankers and policymakers to enhancement Yemen’s banking sector.

This study is considered as the first attempt in examining the role of banking model and ownership type and their link to banking model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the specifics of the relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings management in Russian listed companies. This research is driven by the possibility of placing this relationship within the context of a specific institutional environment for company performance.

The authors apply a panel study of 184 Russian listed companies for the period 2014–2018. In addition to the standard fixed effects model, the authors test the results for potential endogeneity with two-stage least squares (2SLS) analysis.

The results show that audit committee representation on the board of directors results in some mitigation of earnings management. Results reveal that a higher level of audit committee independence and the presence of financial expertise on the committee are associated with lower earnings management. However, companies with relatively busy directors on audit committees are more inclined to practice earnings management. The study’s findings hold after testing for endogeneity of audit committee independence. The authors also reveal that some audit committee characteristics (for example, audit committee independence; its level of expertise) alleviate earnings management in listed state-owned companies (SOEs) more strongly than in listed non-SOEs.

The results add to the ongoing debate on the role of corporate governance mechanisms in mitigating earnings management in emerging markets by taking into account the type of ownership (state-owned vs private) as a moderating variable. This study reveals, in particular, that the effect of certain audit committee characteristics on earnings management is more prominent in listed SOEs than in listed non-SOEs.

The purpose of this study is to examine efficiency differences among petroleum firms based on their ownership status, with the aim of helping these firms understand how specific levels of state-ownership affects efficiency and to bring new perspective to the ownership-performance literature.

The study uses ten-year data (2001-2010) of 32 global petroleum firms categorized into four groups based on ownership types. The metafrontier analysis is used with the dynamic slack-based measure to estimate dynamic efficiency differences among the groups while respectively, accounting for carryover variables such as oil and gas reserves.

Fully state-owned firms outperformed private, majority and minority state-owned firms, indicating that not all types of state-owned petroleum firms are outperformed by private firms. Additionally, firms with shared ownership between state and private are seen to have a lesser comparative advantage in the industry than those with full private or state ownership.

Jointly owned petroleum firms should consider converting ownership to either full private or full state control. Conflict management measures should be used to handle possible conflicts between different shareholding groups.

This is among the first studies to sub-group state ownership into various levels to comprehensively examine specific levels of state ownership that is detrimental to the performance of petroleum firms. It is also the premier oil efficiency study to use the metafrontier framework to cater for group heterogeneity. The study treats oil and gas reserves as interconnecting variables that are not consumed only in the period for which they are discovered to ensure fair assessment.

The authors empirically investigate the association between acquisition, ownership structure and accrual earnings management (AEM) on real earnings management (REM) using Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-listed firms' context.

The authors' sample consists of 1,892 firm-year observations for the period from 2007–2017, and the authors adopt a panel data approach in investigating the interrelationships in this study. The authors employ different econometrics approach to test the authors' hypotheses.

The findings reveal that acquiring companies engage more in AEM if compared to REM. In terms of ownership structure, institutional ownership and state ownership mitigate the engagement in REM, whereas foreign ownership is found to be an ineffective mechanism in reducing engagement in REM. The authors report similar findings on ownership structure for AEM. The authors also find that the GCC firms engage more in REM when the firms engage in AEM, suggesting a complementary relation between these two earnings management techniques. These findings are robust after controlling for different aspects including any endogeneity issue in the authors' models.

The authors' research highlights the importance of understanding REM and AEM dynamics in GCC context. Also, the authors' findings on ownership structure suggest that GCC-listed firms can gain from institutional and state ownership which restricts earnings management, improving firm transparency and subsequently impacting firm performance.

This paper aims to combine the agency theory and efficiency wage theory to explore the effects of relative compensation for executive directors with marketing experience on two marketing outcomes (marketing efficiency and market share) and the moderating roles of ownership type (private vs state-owned enterprises) and market concentration in this process.

A total of 2,753 firm-year observations from Chinese listed companies (from 2010 to 2014) were retrieved from China Stock Market and Accounting Research database and analyzed using firm random-effects with industry, year and region fixed effects.

Relative compensation has a positive effect on both marketing efficiency and market share, and these effects are moderated by ownership type and market concentration. Specifically, the positive effect of relative compensation on marketing efficiency and market share are stronger for central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) compared to local SOEs and private-owned enterprises but the results are mixed for market concentration.

This study shows that paying higher compensation to the executive directors with marketing experience can enhance marketing performance, but the data does not allow identification of the actual actions taken by these directors for this.

This study highlights the importance of appropriate compensation for directors with marketing experience to motivate them to make better marketing decisions to overcome the challenges posed by market concentration and agency conflicts.

This paper points out the importance of having directors with marketing experience and paying them suitable compensation to motivate them to be more effective.

Based on a lens of analysis combining legitimacy and stakeholder theories, this paper aims to explore some factors which influence anti-corruption (AC) reporting in large multinationals from emerging countries.

An ordinal logistic regression is used to assess the relation between the AC reporting and multinationals’ industrial affiliation, number of countries of operations, membership of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and public ownership. The sample was drawn from the 2016 Transparency International Report “Transparency in Corporate Reporting – Assessing Emerging Market Multinationals”.

Evidence suggests that in emerging countries, listed multinationals, which operate in a large number of countries or are members of the UNGC, present significant levels of AC reporting. Unexpectedly, results also suggest that such reporting is not significantly affected by the corruption risk level of the industries to which the multinationals belong. Finally, results suggest that in emerging markets, the dependency for resources may also affect AC reporting.

This paper contributes to the extant literature, by exploring different determinants of AC reporting, namely, a thus far unexplored one: public vs private ownership. This paper also contributes to the literature by providing insights into the relationships in a specific context: that of emerging countries. Finally, the reliance on the international community for the provision of resources is shown as a factor that potentially affects AC reporting.

Employing the anti-corruption campaign as an exogenous political shock, this paper examines how political intervention shapes the impact of financial expert CEOs on firm investment decisions.

This paper uses a sample of 2,808 Chinese firms listed in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2003 to 2016. Panel data is used for conducting the analysis controlling for firm, industry, and year fixed effects.

The authors found that CEOs with financial expertise are sensitive to political intervention when making investment decisions. First, financial expert CEOs spend more on R&D expenditure in private-owned companies and they are associated with less R&D expenditure in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Second, financial expert CEOs are associated with higher investment expenditure in general, but they become less likely to invest more in the post-anti-corruption period. The reduction in investment expenditure due to the anti-corruption campaign is more pronounced in SOEs than in private-owned companies. Third, the anti-corruption campaign promotes R&D investment in general, but in SOEs, expert CEOs tend to be less likely to invest more on R&D after the anti-corruption shock.

This paper enriches the growing literature on the impact of political intervention and the role of the anti-corruption campaign on corporate behaviour.

This paper aims to link location choice and ownership structure to the debate on the multinationality–performance relationship.

This paper draws on a panel data set that covers 1,321 emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) and includes 4,227 observations from 44 emerging economies between 2004 and, 2013.

The empirical results find that multinationality has a positive effect on EMNEs’ performance, and that this positive effect is larger for their investments in developed countries than in developing countries. The study also finds that this positive effect of foreign operation in developed countries switch to negative at higher levels of multinationality for privately owned EMNEs than for state-owned EMNEs.

This paper provides new empirical evidence to support an institutional perspective of the internationalisation of EMNEs that are investing in developed countries, contributing to the multinationality-performance literature, highlighting the importance of foreign direct investment location decision and ownership structure.