O impacto das diferenças culturais na governança corporativa: uma análise do nível país e regional

Abstract

The aim of this study was to understand an aspect that has been little explored when it comes to corporate governance, which is the possible influence of a country’s culture on corporate governance’s practices. In the last decades several studies have tried to understand the determinants of corporate governance both at country and firm level. Studies as the one of La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer and Vishny (2000) for example, presents aspects of a country's legal system and minority shareholders’ protection as important factors in differentiating CG practices between countries and companies. Most part of the studies on culture do not measure cultural aspects for a quantitative analysis, however, Hofstede proposed a model able to assign values to cultural dimensions, which enable the occurrence of several quantitative studies involving countries’ cultural aspects. Considering such a scenario, the overall goal of this research is to analyze the relation between culture and earnings management. To do so, this research was divided into two studies, which are; - Study 1) Verify whether the general culture of a country could influence organizations’ transparency, which would be reflected in the level of earnings management; - Study 2) Verify in more restricted terms, if Brazilian regional culture could influence companies’ earnings management. In order to achieve the objective of Study 1, we used factorial analysis to group cultural dimensions and regression to analyze variables’ relation for the sample of companies listed on the stock markets of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and United States. For Study 2 we used regression with panel data for the sample of Brazilian companies, separating companies by their headquarters’ region, in order to identify possible regional cultural traits. According to the literature, corporate governance’s concept is multidimensional, involving mechanisms related to the board of directors; ownership structure and control; minority shareholders’ protection; managers’ compensation and information transparency. This study focuses on the latter one, as it represents communication with investors. We measured transparency through two different metrics: (a) Leuz, Nanda and Wisocki (2003), which proposes to measure the quality of the published information through measures of financial data smoothing; and (b) Kang and Sivaramakrishnan (1995) which assess discretionary accruals and non-discretionary accruals, which was named as the KS model. The results from Study 1 suggest that among the different cultural dimensions analyzed, countries of a more individualistic society (represented by the dimensions Affective Autonomy and Intellectual Autonomy) tend to demand higher levels of transparency. With regard regional aspect in Brazil, it was shown by Study 2 that regions where society is more risk-averse, earnings management are higher (model Leuz et al, 2003). It has been also observed that in regions where society is more focused on long-term planning there is a higher management of reported profits (model Leuz et al, 2003). Overall, our results suggest culture influences firms’ earnings management, both in the multi-country analysis and when considering the regional culture around Brazilian firms.