Purpose

Prior studies had documented that CEOs with accounting backgrounds are more conservative as compared to their non-accounting backgrounds counterparts. However, prior studies also suggested that CEOs with accounting backgrounds tend to engage in earnings management activities because they have the knowledge to do so. Motivated by these findings, this study aims to examine empirically the possibility of executive compensation to play a moderating role in influencing the behaviour of CEO with accounting backgrounds towards earnings management.

Design/methodology/approach

This study uses the data from 2013 to 2017 from Malaysian FTSE Top 30 companies. The data on the education backgrounds of the CEOs were collected manually from the companies’ annual reports. CEOs with accounting qualification was coded 1, and 0, otherwise. The earnings management were the discretionary accruals estimated using the modified Jones (1991) model. Meanwhile, the data on executive compensation was also collected manually from the companies’ annual reports. All other governance data were also collected manually from the annual reports, and financial data was collected using the Thompson Reuters DataStream application.

Findings

This study found that compensation suffered multicollinearity with the CEO accounting background, thus ineligible to act as a moderating variable between the latter and earnings management. The result further documented a negative but insignificant relationship between compensation with earnings management.

Originality/value

This study discusses the possibility of executive compensation as a moderating variable in the relationship between CEOs with accounting backgrounds and earnings management, whereby, to the authors’ best knowledge, such a discussion is limited in the existing literature.

中文翻译：

---

悬着一根胡萝卜：薪酬水平会影响有会计背景的 CEO 对盈余管理的行为吗？

目的

先前的研究表明，与非会计背景的 CEO 相比，有会计背景的 CEO 更为保守。然而，先前的研究也表明，具有会计背景的 CEO 倾向于从事盈余管理活动，因为他们有这样做的知识。受这些发现的启发，本研究旨在实证检验高管薪酬在影响具有会计背景的 CEO 对盈余管理的行为方面发挥调节作用的可能性。

设计/方法/方法

本研究使用马来西亚富时 30 强公司 2013 年至 2017 年的数据。CEO 的教育背景数据是从公司年报中人工收集的。具有会计资格的CEO编码为1，否则为0。盈余管理是使用修正的琼斯 (1991) 模型估计的可自由支配的应计费用。同时，高管薪酬数据也是从公司年报中人工收集的。所有其他治理数据也是从年度报告中手动收集的，财务数据是使用 Thompson Reuters DataStream 应用程序收集的。

发现

本研究发现薪酬与 CEO 会计背景存在多重共线性，因此不适合作为后者与盈余管理之间的调节变量。结果进一步证明了薪酬与盈余管理之间存在负向但微不足道的关系。

原创性/价值

本研究讨论了高管薪酬作为具有会计背景的 CEO 与盈余管理之间关系的调节变量的可能性，据作者所知，这种讨论仅限于现有文献。