Ownership structure of a company and accounting earnings management

The objective of our study is to investigate whether the ownership structure of a company, includingownership concentration, managerial ownership and the presence of institutional investors, affects accrualearnings management practices. We first modelled discretionary accruals using the modified approach ofJones (1991), and then we built the model describing the relationship between discretionary accruals andelements of ownership structure of companies and control variables, determining regression using theleast square method. We provided evidence of negative dependence between the magnitude of accrualearnings management and shareholder concentration. We do not corroborate the relationship betweenaccrual earnings management and managerial ownership. The presence of institutional investors reducesthe magnitude of accrual earnings management. We do not provide evidence that the presence of StateTreasury affects accrual earnings management. We do not confirm that accrual earnings management isused for meeting or beating earnings benchmarks.