Gerenciamento de resultados em empresas latino-americanas: análise do papel da pandemia da Covid-19 e das políticas de governança corporativa

Abstract

This research aims to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic saw a variation in the use of earnings management practices in Latin American listed companies, and to analyze whether corporate governance acted as a mitigating factor for this effect. To do so, we analyzed the absolute discretionary accruals, income smoothing and big bath for Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian, Mexican, and Peruvian companies during the years 2018 to 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 to 2021 (during the pandemic), totaling 550 companies and 2,318 observations. We collected data in Refinitiv and performed the analyzes using R, both for all countries together (general sample) and for each country. First, in the analysis of the relationship between the pandemic and earnings management, we found that, for the complete sample, during the pandemic there was a higher value of absolute discretionary accruals, but there was no variation in the income smoothing or in the big bath practices. However, in the sample by country, we observe a higher level of accruals for Chile and a lower level of income smoothing for Brazil but found no statistically significant variation for the big bath. Then, in the analysis of the mediating effect of corporate governance, we observed no statistically significant relationship for the general sample, but we observed great variation among countries. Corporate governance softened the effect of the pandemic on the use of accruals in Colombia but intensified it in Mexico. While income smoothing decreased in Colombia during the pandemic, companies with greater governance smoothed their earnings more in this period, but in Mexico, companies with greater governance showed a lower level of income smoothing. Finally, for the big bath, in Peru, companies with a higher level of governance showed greater use of this practice during the pandemic. These results show Latin America as a region with a lot of cultural and socioeconomic diversity, which is reflected in Accounting and in the way it was affected by the pandemic.