Institutional ownership and monitoring: Evidence from financial misreporting

We find that the likelihood and severity of financial misreporting is positively related to aggregate institutional ownership and this effect can be largely attributed to ownership by institutions with short investment horizons those with little incentive to engage in costly monitoring of firm activities and precisely those that sell at the announcement of a restatement. We also find that the concentration of holdings by these institutions offsets this effect, which suggests concentrated ownership induces greater monitoring and mitigates the incentives for firms to misreport. Our results suggest that any link between myopic firm decision making and institutional ownership may be related to the nature of institutional monitoring. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.