| Abstract [eng] |
In Lithuania, the link between accounting manipulation and corporate social responsibility has not been addressed, so no assessment has been made as to whether and how Lithuanian socially responsible companies manipulate financial information. The research problem of the dissertation is to identify the link between accounting manipulation and corporate social responsibility by assessing the impact of corporate social responsibility on earnings management. The dissertation conceptualises earnings management, identifies types of earnings management, techniques and methods of application. An expert evaluation solved the problem of terminology prevailing in the foreign and Lithuanian scientific and practitioner literature, and constructed a definition of earnings management. The incompatibility between corporate social responsibility and earnings management has been identified by revealing the essence of corporate social responsibility and the main elements of the model. The prevalence of different types of earnings management in Lithuanian medium and large enterprises, the trends in the use of earnings management and the strategies of profit manipulation (profit-enhancing or profit-reducing) were empirically investigated. The study also found that socially responsible companies were less likely to have earnings management practices than other companies. This suggests that Lithuanian companies have a conceptual approach to corporate social responsibility. The assessment of the impact of corporate social responsibility on the use of earnings management in the context of financial and macroeconomic indicators showed that: corporate social responsibility reduces the use of earnings management; the leverage hypothesis was confirmed that the higher the financial leverage of a firm, the more likely firms are to use earnings management; the political cost hypothesis was confirmed only under conditions of economic uncertainty; gross domestic product, inflation and unemployment rates can only affect the use of earnings management when firms do not achieve the desired level of profitability. |
