Data for: The Role of Large Shareholders in Goodwill Impairment Decisions – Evidence from China

1) The “main” dataset is used to examine our primary research questions: how large shareholders manage goodwill impairment to inflate earnings and the role of auditors in mitigating this behavior using data from China. Data is collected from CSMAR and WIND databases. It includes 13,792 firm-year observations of A-share listed companies in China from 2007 to 2019. Goodwill impairment is measured using both a dummy variable (GWIMP_dum) to capture the likelihood, and a continuous variable (GWIMP_amo) to capture the amount. The influence of large shareholders is measured by the percentage of shares held by the largest shareholder (TOP1) of a firm. The role of auditors is measured by whether a firm hires a Big4 auditor (BIG4).

2) The “main0” dataset is used to conduct one of the robustness tests where firms that did not report goodwill assets are added to the “main” dataset to form a new and larger sample.

3) The “do” file includes the Stata commands for all the tests conducted in the study.