The Impact of Ownership Structure and Companies’ Characteristics on Earnings Quality: Empirical Study on Jordanian insurance companies

The purpose of the study is to produce evidence about the effect of ownership structure and firm characteristics on earnings quality .The study is based on all insurance companies, the population size is 24companies and the observations are 205 during the period 2005-2013.Two earnings quality measures are used (Accruals Quality and Abnormal Accruals-Jones). The researcher used multiple regressions to test the hypotheses. The results of this study reveal that the effect of ownership structure variables are different depending on earnings quality measure, and generally the institutional ownership variable shows statistical effect on earnings quality, however ,the effect of government ownership shows statistical effect on abnormal accrual, It is also found that the characteristics variable growth demonstrate statistical effect on earnings quality, performance variable has significant effect on accruals quality measure; leverage and size variable showed no effect on any earnings quality measure.