داوود حسن پور

Chief executive officers (CEO), as the central pillar directing companies at the capital market level, plays a critical role in making investment decisions to de-crease agency costs and maximize shareholders’ wealth; however, their psycho-logical attitudes and perceptions lead to different investment functions of these companies in a competitive market. Accordingly, this study aimed to detect the propositional arrays of the investment functions using Q analysis in order to identify the CEOs’ mental typology in distinguishing investment functions. The present study was carried out with the participation of 13 CEOs from Tehran Stock Exchange companies during a one-year period (2018-2019). The study encompassed two different phases. In the first phase, content analysis was used to identify the phrase Q of the CEOs’ investment functions. In the second phase, Q analysis was adopted to typify the CEOs’ investment functions, which was based on the subjective cognition of the target population and contributed to the development of the approaches in line with the research objectives. The results confirmed the existence of three mental patterns in the CEOs regarding the in-vestment functions in the capital market. These mental patterns were ‘investment function in stock market indices’ as the first mental pattern, ‘investment function in risk control’ as the second mental pattern, ‘strategic investment function’ as the third mental pat-tern. The study results revealed different types of investment functions among the CEOs’ of stock exchange companies and thus contributed to the development of financial theories from the perspective of CEOs’ cognition.

Recent accounting and management literature shows that demographic character-istics of top management and corporate performance are related. Accordingly, using a two-stage least squares regression model (2SLS), this study examines the relationship between some management demographic characteristics including CEO tenure, gender and level of education with earnings quality and auditor choice. Sample includes the 420 firm-year observations from companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2013 to 2017 and research hypothesis was tested using multivariate regression models. The results show a significant and positive association between managers education level and higher auditor quality choice. In addition, we find that firms with female directors in the composition of the board of directors and with higher education levels, have higher earnings quality. The current study is almost the first study which has been conducted in Iran, so the findings of the study not only extend the extant theoretical literature in developing countries including emerging capital market of Iran, but also help investors, capital market regulators and accounting standard setters to make in-formed decisions.