The owner-manager ethical profile’s influence on the accounting numbers informativeness
Since the pioneers works of Beaver, Ball and Brown in 1968, a lot of literature has been developed around the problem of accounting numbers informativeness. At the beginning of this century, the debate has been renewed by financial scandals. In most of the cases, the perspective of analysis retained by various studies was that of highly-rated manager companies. As far as this perspective of analysis does not allow to easily understand the influence of the actors on the quality of accounting numbers, this article proposes an extension of the problem in SME context, the main question being to know if the ethical profile of the owner-managers influences the informative contents of these numbers. The empirical study concerns the accounting data of a sample of 93 SME candidates to bank financing. The main result brought to light is that SME impsen rationing on the banking credit market are surprisingly the ones whose book value of the net assets is relatively higher. The analysis leads to the conclusion that ethical profile of the owner-mangers justifies this result.