Studying the impact of corporate governance on earning management with the mediating role of financial leverage

The present study aims to investigate the impact of corporate governance on the profit management of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2014-2020. This study is experimental and the research method is correlational. The statistical population includes all companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. The required data were collected by referring to the audited financial statements of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange over a period of 7 years for 120 companies. Eviews-10 software was also used to analyze the data. The results showed that there is no significant systematic relationship between corporate governance characteristics (board independence, duality of the CEO, and the number of board meetings) and abnormal operating cash flows at any of the significant levels (p> 0.01, p> 0.05, 0.10). Moreover, the results showed that there is a significant negative relationship between financial leverage and earning management of companies because the probability value of this variable (0.02) is less than the standard value of 0.05. In addition, the findings showed that there is a positive and significant relationship among financial leverage, corporate governance, and earnings management.