Earning Management Practices and Corporate Governance Mechanism in Manufacturing and Oil Sector in Nigeria: A Post Covid-19 Review

ABSTRACT: The study broadly investigated earning management practices and corporate governance mechanism in manufacturing and oil sector in Nigeria especially after the Covid-19 era. Specifically, this study adopted board independence, audit committee effectiveness and ownership concentration as proxies for corporate governance while discretionary accruals was adopted as proxy for earning management practices. Data for the study was collected from annual reports of selected manufacturing and oil firms from 2020-2024. Panel data (fixed effect) regression technique was deployed in analyzing the data. Findings showed that board independence had negative and significant effect on earning management practices in Nigerian manufacturing and oil sectors while audit committee effectiveness dipped earning management practices insignificantly. Furthermore, the study showed that ownership concentration had positive and insignificant effect on earning management practices in Nigeria. The study recommends that manufacturing and oil firms should endeavor to sustain the level of board independence in order to significantly reduce earning management practices in Nigeria.