Liu et al (2017)

Liu, Mingzhi, Yulin Shi, Craig Wilson, and Zhenyen Wu. “Does Family Involvement Explain Why Corporate Social Responsibility Affects Earnings Management?.” Journal of Business Research, June 2017.

From the authors’ abstract: “We investigate how family involvement in the ownership, management, or governance of a business affects its engagement in earnings management both directly and indirectly through its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. Using a sample of S&P 500 companies, we find that family firms tend to have higher CSR performance, which can help them to maintain legitimacy and preserve socio-emotional wealth. Family firms also engage in less accrual-based earnings management, although they are indistinguishable from non-family firms in terms of real earnings management. In contrast to previous research, we find that CSR performance is not significantly associated with either accrual-based or real earnings management behavior after we account for the effect of family involvement.”

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296317300486