Under the leadership of Professor and a Research Center Director at the Caucasus Business School, Erekle Pirveli, a proposed research project has obtained Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation's 2023 Fundamental (Basic State) Research Grant.
463 project applications have been registered in the competition, which were evaluated by the European Science Foundation (ESF-SC).
Project title: "CSR Disclosure, Earnings Management and Corporate Governance: A Georgian Perspective“.
Aim: With the investors increased appetite to know more about businesses’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, CSR disclosure becomes on par with equal prominence with financial disclosure. Consequently, scholarly literature has questioned the influence of CSR disclosure on earnings quality, leading to clearly juxtaposed results. The purpose of this research project is to examine the relations between CSR disclosure and earnings management in the context of emerging Georgia. We argue that the influence of CSR disclosure on earnings management is contingent upon the role of corporate governance that shall play a negative moderating role in the mentioned relation. We will cover environmental and social aspects of CSR disclosure, discretionary and real earnings management activities, and ownership structure, board independence, CEO duality, and internal audit committee elements of corporate governance. The analysis will run based on the annual reports’ content analysis of the largest Georgian publicly admitted entities. Based upon a unique sample of hundreds of Georgian private and public sector entities, we will examine the relation between CSR disclosure and earnings management, and observe the contingent role of corporate governance as a resistant factor to restrict managers' ability to manipulate earnings. The findings are likely to encourage local entities to incorporate CSR perspectives in annual reports, thus building the wider society’s trust in local capital markets.
- Budget: 179 400 GEL
- Duration: 3 years
- Project evaluation score: 45 points (out of 50)
Project team:
- Erekle Pirveli, Caucasus University, Georgia;
- Jochen Zimmermann, University of Bremen, Germany;
- Timur Uman, Jönköping University, Sweden;
- Prof. Iza Gigauri, Sant. Andria University, Georgia;
- Vakhtang Berishvili, Caucasus University, Georgia.
