Corporate social responsibility vs. accounting ethics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze if sustainable companies show a higher quality of the accounting information, identified by the lower tendency to carry out earnings management. This relationship is tested for an unbalanced sample of 1960 multinational non-financial listed companies from 26 countries for the period 2002-2010.The use of simultaneous equations for panel data, via the GMM estimator proposed by Arellano and Bond (1991), highlights the existence of a negative relationship between both variables. The results obtained are robust for different measures of earnings management and corporate social responsibility. © 2012 ASEPUC.