The effect of dividend payments and firm’s attributes on earnings quality: empirical evidence from Egypt

  • Received May 25, 2018;
    Accepted October 18, 2018;
    Published January 10, 2019
  • Author(s)
    Gehan A. Mousa
    ORCID Researcher ID ,
    Abdelmohsen Desoky
    ORCID Researcher ID
  • DOI
    http://dx.doi.org/10.21511/imfi.16(1).2019.02
  • Article Info
    Volume 16 2019, Issue #1, pp. 14-29
  • TO CITE АНОТАЦІЯ
  • Cited by
    4 articles
  • 1934 Views
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

This empirical study aims mainly to investigate the effect of both dividend payments (DP) and five firm's attributes (firm size, firm leverage, firm performance, legal form and audit quality) on earnings quality (EQ) of the most active listed firms in Egypt. A sample of 552 firm-year observations during four years from 2014 to 2017 was used. Hierarchical Multiple Regression (HMR) was used to regress the six independent variables on firms’ EQ through the absence of firms’ earnings management (EM), which was estimated through discretionary accruals (DAC). Main results show that there is some divergence in EM practices over the four years and might suggest that EM by listed firms in Egypt exists especially in the first two years (2014 and 2015); how¬ever, relatively lower EM practices are found in the last two years (2016 and 2017). Correlation results show a number of significant relationships between the EM and three independent variables (firm leverage, legal form and audit quality). HMR results are in line with the results obtained via Pearson correlation.

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    • Table 1. Firms included in this investigation
    • Table 2. Summary of all the variables included in the study
    • Table 3. Descriptive statistics of variables included in this study
    • Table 4. Correlation between the EQ and other variables
    • Table 5. Results of hierarchical regression models
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