Institutional Ownership

One of the reasons that companies avoid paying their taxes is that they choose to use debts for their funding. In other words, tax saving, an activity of companies to avoid taxpaying, can be used to finance corporate projects. Furthermore, since institutional owners are more inclined to supervise, they may shrink managerial behaviors to avoid taxpaying. In this study, institutional owners’ supervisory role about tax efficiency on corporate capital structure was investigated. For this purpose, a sample of 98 companies from 2005 to 2014 was selected from companies listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Following the research conducted by Kramer, multiple linear regression based on panel data and the econometric software Eviews were used for testing the research hypotheses. The results show that tax has a negative and significant impact and institutional ownership has a positive and significant impact on capital structure. In addition, the institutional ownership in corporate companies impacts and adjusts the relationship between tax and capital structure.

However, the free cash flows scale is important for the financial health of the company, but it has also its own limitations. Moreover, it’s not immune from accounting tricks. Free cash flows can be considered as a measure of value for shareholders of listed companies on Tehran Stock Exchange. The managers of these companies have tended to use the earnings management for managing the free cash flow and ultimately shareholder value and wealth. The main objective of this study is to investigate the interactive effect of institutional ownership and board independence on the relationship between excess free cash flow and earnings management in the Tehran Stock Exchange. The study is applied and correlation research by its objective and nature. The variables used in this study have been extracted from the financial reports of listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange and the web page of Tehran Stock Exchange in the period of 2009 to 2015. The results suggest that, "institutional ownership" and "board independence" on the relationship between "surplus free cash flow and earnings management" had no significant effect.

Performance appraisal is a process which help shareholders make informed and optimal investment decisions. In recent decades, a long stream of research has devoted particular attention to the importance and impact of financial decisions on firm performance and firm value. The present study thus is primarily concerned with investigating the association between free cash flow and institutional ownership and long-term performance of the firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange over the period of 2012-2016. Moreover, firm size, financial leverage and sale grows serve as the control variables of the research. A number of 89 firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange were selected, and then the research hypotheses were tested using multivariate regression model based on panel data. The results reveal that firm long-term performance is not significantly correlated with free cash flow, yet it has a significant relationship with institutional ownership.

"Corporate governance" includes mechanisms to monitor CEO's performance to assure efficient decision adoption and maximize firm value. One of the most effective aspects of firm performance is the degree of risk-taking. This study investigates the relationship between CEO power and institutional ownership with risk-taking behavior of member firms of Tehran Stock Exchange and Iran Fara Bourse during 2010-2019 by utilizing quintile regression. According to the results, by the increase of CEO's power and the company's benefit from powerful managers, the company risk (total risk and systemic risk) will decrease. As a result, managers are eager to safeguard their reputation as expert decision-makers and, as a result, they try to reduce company risk. In addition, the existence of institutional ownership among the shareholders of the company will reduce the risk, which can be referred to in the agency theory. Also, if the impact of these two variables is considered together, the risk will increase significantly. This very fact reflects the exercise of the power and influence of institutional owners. As a result, large shareholders have a supervisory role in the discipline of managers, but despite their impact on the relationship between managers' power and corporate risk, they do not alter the main negative relationship.

Managers engage in income smoothing either to communicate private information about future earnings to investors (informativeness hypothesis) or to distort financial performance for opportunistic purposes (opportunism hypothesis). Business cycles and the monitoring role of institutional ownership may affect the earnings informativeness of income smoothing. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of business cycles and institutional ownership on the earnings informativeness of income smoothing. 140 firms listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange are selected as the sample over the period 2010-2016. The results showed that, during recession, income smoothing does not effectively communicate information about future earnings and thus earnings are less informative. Moreover, higher levels of institutional ownership are associated with a decrease in their monitoring role and decrease in the earnings informativeness of income smoothing. Finally, the results suggested that the relationship between institutional ownership and the earnings informativeness of income smoothing is not significantly affected by business cycles.