THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACCOUNTING EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND BRAZILIAN PUBLIC COMPANIES’ COST OF CAPITALPITAL OF BRAZILAN COMPANIES

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the accounting earnings management and the cost of capital of Brazilian companies. The data were obtained from Economática® in the period from 2004 to 2006. The models Modified Jones, Teoh and KS were used for calculating the discretionary accrual, proxy for earnings management, which represents the independent variable in this study. The representative measures of cost of capital, or dependent variables were: beta (cost of equity), Ki and Kd (cost of debt). To investigate the relationship between management performance and the borrowing cost for companies, descriptive statistics, Pearson and Spearman’s correlation, and average differences were analyzed through the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test. As result, there was a positive relationship between earnings management and cost of debt. However, it was not possible to find any relations between earnings management and cost of equity.