Ph.D. Mellado-Cid, Cristhian

This article analyses the impact of ownership structure features and institutional settings on real activities manipulation. The analysis is based on a sample of listed companies in the underexplored Latin American market for the period of 2004–2016. Panel-data-based G.M.M. System Estimation is used in the empirical analysis. The results confirm that the monitoring role of the majority owner is crucial in mitigating managerial opportunistic behaviour. Here, opportunistic behaviour refers to engaging in real activities manipulation that reduces the informative content of financial statements. However, analysis of insider ownership revealed that managers had a negative impact on transparency. We observed that as insider ownership increases, managers engage more actively in real earnings management. We also find that the institutional ownership and the quality of the regulatory system proved to be effective mechanisms in reducing real activities manipulation.

We examine real activities manipulation by firms prior to their debt issuances and how such manipulation activities affect bond yield spreads. We find that bond-issuing firms increase their real activities manipulation in the five quarters leading to a bond issuance. We document an inverse association between yield spread and pre-issue real activities manipulation,i.e., firms engaged in abnormally high levels of real activities manipulation are associated with subsequent lower cost of debt.