Sustentabilidade, gerenciamento de resultados e decisões de investimento: um estudo no mercado de capitais brasileiro

Abstract

The literature points out that companies with better practices of corporate sustainability outperform their counterparts in several characteristics, such as better performance, lower risk, and greater transparency in the disclosure of information (Ameer & Othman, 2012; Eccles et al., 2014; Kantabutra, 2011; Khan, Serafeim, & Yoon, 2015; Lameira, Ness, Quelhas, & Pereira, 2013; Weber, 2017). The disclosure of sustainable practices by companies around the world has been associated with a greater level of transparency, especially in environmental and social aspects (Siew, 2015) and a way to measure this transparency is through the earnings management (Martinez, 2008). Earnings management, according to Schipper (1989), is a purposeful intervention in the process of presenting the financial data of firms with the intention of obtaining some private or personal gain. According to the literature, sustainable companies tend to do less earnings management (Kim, Park, & Wier, 2012). Considering these antecedents, the objectives of the paper are (a) to study the relationship between corporate sustainability and earnings management and (b) investigate the possible effects that the sustainability and transparency could have in the decision making of the investors when they allocate their capital in the stock market. To achieve the objective (a) there were developed tests and regressions in Brazilian open capital companies from the B3 for the period from 2010 to 2017. Additionally, to achieve objective (b) an experiment was developed throughout an anonymous opinion survey applied to university students with knowledge and/or experience in finances and/or investments. The result of the investigation related to objective (a) wasn´t any significant relationship between earnings management and corporate earnings. However, a significant relationship between earnings management size and ROA was found. The result of the investigation related to objective (b) indicate that sustainability and transparency do not affect the decision making of the investors. As the main limitations of the investigation stand out the disproportionality in the number of sustainable companies in the Brazilian stock market and the difficulty of treating respondents in a homogeneous way regarding to socio-demographic factors. For further investigations, it is suggested to relate other variables related to corporate sustainability as social responsibility or environmental impact to the analyses the issues previously exposed.