The Moderating Effect of Corporate Governance on the Relationship between Earnings Management and Firm Value: Indonesian Evidence

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of corporate governance on the relationship between earnings management and firm value. Using a sample of 177 Indonesian listed nonfinancial firms during the year 2015, this paper finds that corporate governance mechanism, as represented by the proportion of independent directors, has a negative and significant moderating effect on the relationship between earnings management and firm value. This finding might indicate that the presence of independent directors reveals more about the opportunistic side of earnings management conducted by firms, and therefore punished accordingly with lower valuation by the capital market.