Ownership concentration and accounting information consistency—evidence from Chinese listed companies

PurposeThe authors expand the connotation of the research on the accounting information quality characteristics, provide empirical evidence for the factors of consistency and also help to deepen further their understanding of the economic consequences of ownership concentration and other ownership structures.Design/methodology/approachUsing financial data of Chinese listed companies as samples, coupled with a method to calculate the consistency of the sample enterprises on the corporate level in the 2007–2019 period, the authors studied its impact of ownership concentration on consistency.FindingsThe study finds that after controlling other factors, ownership concentration could significantly reduce accounting information consistency. Further research finds that when the executives' shareholding is higher, the reduction effect of ownership concentration on consistency is weaker. After the robustness test, the conclusion remains basically unchanged.Research limitations/implicationsFirst, maybe there is a limitation of De Franco et al. (2011) method the authors use in China. As some scholars pointed out, the systematic component of returns variation is large in emerging markets (Morck et al., 2000), so it is hard to determine to what extent market stock returns will capture the net effect of earnings. As is mentioned above, there are multiple methods for measuring comparability and consistency, but it is not easy to judge which way is the best. Maybe the authors will have a perfect process in the future. Second, in addition to the factors mentioned in this study's hypotheses, there should be other factors (these include internal factors and external factors) that play moderating role in the impact of ownership concentration on accounting information consistency. The authors have not thoroughly studied the effect of those factors. These limitations all need to be further explored in the future.Originality/valueThe study finds that after controlling other factors, ownership concentration could significantly reduce accounting information consistency, but the reduction will be affected by some other factors related to corporate governance. The new insights from these advances are that the conclusions provide a technical path for management of companies to improve corporate governance efficiency and the quality of accounting information, and also provide more reference and empirical evidence for information users to identify the company's accounting information quality, which contributes to creating a prerequisite for the usefulness of accounting information.