This study investigates the influence of ownership structure and board characteristics on discretionary accruals and real earnings management using the data of A-shares in Chinese

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of shareholding stability of institutional investors on firm performance. We analyze 647 sample companies listed in the Taiwan Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2009 using the coefficient of variance of institutional holding proportion as the measure for ownership stability. The empirical results show that increasing stability of institutional holdings is related to better firm performance. The low-risk and younger firms with higher CEO incentive compensation, larger insider holdings, and higher growth usually have better performance. Furthermore, when the long-term institutional shareholdings, particularly of foreign institutions, are higher, the firm performance is better.

This study uses sample companies listed in Taiwan Stock Exchange and GreTai Securities Market during 2000 to 2011 to investigate the influence of earnings equality and liquidity on the cost of equity. We define discretionary accruals with three measures and real earnings management with three measures as indicators of earnings quality; trading volume, individual stock liquidity and market liquidity as liquidity measures and individual stock and market liquidity risk as liquidity risk measures. Panel data is suggested for this analysis. Firms manipulating discretionary accruals increase in the cost of equity, but ones operating real earnings management decrease in it when considering that the earnings quality and liquidity directly impact on it. The cost of equity is indirectly influenced by earnings quality and liquidity through information asymmetry measured by bid-ask spreads. The results show that no matter firms engaging in discretionary accruals or real earnings can decrease the cost of equity under higher levels of information asymmetry. The higher the trading volume or the individual stock liquidity risk, the lower the cost of equity when information asymmetry is low.