Abstract:

The study draws on triangulation approach to evaluate the association between Chief Executive Officer (CEO) duality and creditability of financial reporting, proxied by discretionary accruals. As there has been an ongoing debates and conflict on whether the CEO duality eliminate or increase opportunistic earnings manipulations.

Design/ Methodology/Approach:

The research focused on 78 Egyptian listed companies including 780 observations from (2008 to 2017) after excluding firms with insufficient data, Banks and Financial Institutions, and Insurance Companies. The paper employs Feasible Least Square and System Generalized Method of moment to test the association between CEO duality and non-duality on the opportunistic behavior of managers.

Findings:

Empirical findings on the association between CEO leadership and earnings manipulations are inconclusive. Consistent with the agency theory, we reveal that dual leadership increase the opportunistic earning manipulations based on kaznik model. While, dual or unitary leadership has no impact on opportunistic behavior of management based on the other models.

Research/ Implication:

To my knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the role of dual CEO leadership on the earning quality using different models with more advanced statistical technique. The methods take into consideration the endogeneity, heteroscedastic issue and simultaneity. Also, it is important to explicitly consider the institutional and legal setting of countries while examining Corporate Governance (CG) mechanisms on earnings quality as the practice and implementation of some CG mechanisms differ from one country to another.