Ownership Concentration and Earnings Management Practice of Nigerian Listed Conglomerates
Shehu Hassan Usman, Jibril Ibrahim Yero

Abstract
This study examines ownership concentration and earnings management practice of the Nigerian listed conglomerates. It proxied earnings management using the modified Jones (Dechow et’al, 1995) model. Using 30 firm-year panelled observations, we estimated panel OLS and controlled for fixed/random effects. The result shows a significant negative relationship between ownership concentration and earnings management. The Hausman specification test shows that the panel result after controlling for random, best suits the population as the fixed effect hypothesis was rejected by the Wald/Ch2 test. Of the control variables, only returns on assets is significant. Leverage and firm size were not significant. We hence concludes that ownership concentration indeed moderates the practice of earnings management in Nigerian listed conglomerates. Further studies may be carried out to include earnings management with real cash-flow consequences.

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