<p>The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of gender diversity on the boardroom and in top management positions on earnings management by French-listed firms. Based on a sample of 170 firms over 4 years, we find that the proportion of women on the board standing as a director or a chair reduces earnings management. This finding suggests that women are effective on their monitoring role and are then considered as a crucial corporate governance device. We also find that the relationship between the presence of at least three women on the board and earnings management is negative suggesting that by increasing the number of women on board through regulation and legislation, French firms are likely to enhance the effectiveness of the board to better detect earnings management. However, women standing in CEO and CFO positions do not affect earnings management practices. These findings suggest that efforts made by political bodies to promote equality between men and women on boards are beneficial for French-listed companies by limiting earnings management practices. However, regulating or imposing a quota of women on boards can create a temporal shortage of qualified women available to take up such positions.</p>

This research will focus on a study evoking the dilemma of the agency linking the principal to the agent. In the effects of the earnings management on the corporate overinvestment, along with the moderating role of the CEO gender, as a lever of control, our study focuses on a panel of 130 French companies over a period of four years, by the application of instrumental variables estimation (SLS)

Based on 1575 firms-year observations from French companies listed on the Paris stock exchange from 2009 to 2017, this research study investigates the linkage between accounting conservatism and highest-paid chief executive officers (CEOs) and if this linkage increases as executive remuneration-performance sensitivity increases. The study’s findings show that there is a negative association between accounting conservatism and highest-paid CEOs. These findings suggest that the highest-paid CEOs can manage and restrict managerial accounting choices for their own gains, and, in turn, this has a negative effect on accounting conservatism. Firstly, in order to achieve generally discretionary goals, they distort the accounting figures by overvaluing their companies’ gains. Secondly, the negative linkage between accounting conservatism and highest-paid CEOs increases when they receive greater remuneration incentives for accounting performance. These findings indicate that powerful CEOs are incentivized to adjust earnings since the greater incentives help them to inflate their companies’ accounting results; to distort accounting performance, and provide investors with misleading information. In turn, such actions generate the ex-post settling up problems and end, unfortunately, in fraudulent behaviors. This study contributes to the literature that studies the relationship between accounting conservatism and the highest-paid senior executives in order to identify accounting conservatism (Iwasaki, Otomasa, Shiiba, & Shuto, 2018; Li, Henry, & Wu, 2019; Haider, Singh, & Sultana, 2021).