Just as the share ownership structure delineates a firm’s agency problem, it also impacts the firm’s reporting. When an owner effectively controls a firm, he/she also controls the production of the firm’s accounting information and reporting policies. When the controlling owner is entrenched by his/her voting power and there is a large separation of the voting and cash flow rights, the credibility of the accounting information is reduced. That is, outside investors pay less attention to the reported accounting numbers, because they expect that the controlling owner reports accounting information out of self-interest rather than as a reflection of the firm’s true underlying economic transactions. In particular, outside.
