The Quality of Accounting Information in Politically Connected Firms

Chaney, Paul and Faccio, Mara and Parsley, David (2009): The Quality of Accounting Information in Politically Connected Firms.

Abstract

We document that the quality of earnings reported by politically connected firms is significantly poorer than that of similar non-connected companies. Moreover, we find that earnings quality has no predictive power for the likelihood of establishing connections. Hence, we rule out that our results (on average) are simply due to firms with ex-ante poor earnings quality establishing connections more often. Instead, our results suggest that, because of a lesser need to respond to market pressures to increase the quality of information, connected companies can afford disclosing lower quality accounting information. In particular, lower quality reported earnings is associated with a higher cost of debt only for the non-politically connected firms in the sample.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: political Ties; information quality
• Subjects: G - Financial Economics > G1 - General Financial Markets; G - Financial Economics > G3 - Corporate Finance and Governance

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