Antecedents and Consequence of Governance Characteristics, Earnings Management, and Company Performance: An Empirical Study in Iraq

The outbreak of the financial crisis, the lack of corporate governance practices in Iraqi companies, the high level of earnings management (EM), and weak firm performance (FP) have all encouraged the purpose of this study. This study proposes to achieve the following objectives: (I) to investigate the influence of governance mechanisms on the earnings management practices, (II) to investigate the consequence of EM on FP. The study sample includes 65 Iraqi firms listed on the Iraqi stock exchange for six years from 2012 to 2018, with 390 firm-year observations. The hypotheses were tested using panel data regression. According to the findings, Iraqi companies prefer to use real EM rather than accruals EM to avoid reporting losses. Discretionary cash flow; production costs, and cash flow from operation are examples of actual operations employed to undertake F.M. Furthermore, according to the findings of this study, board meeting frequency and female onboard have a significant and negative influence on EM. Besides, the internal audit function was found not to affect EM. On the other hand, results revealed a significant and negative relationship between EM and FP. According to the study, management prefers to minimize cash and accrual expenditure during the economic downturn.