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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how fair value reporting and increased managerial discretion under the new goodwill accounting affect the asymmetric timeliness of earnings;, i.e. accounting conservatism.

Various empirical models are applied to a sample of 11,034 firms. To capture a cross‐sectional variation in asymmetric timeliness of earnings, Kahn and Watts' C_Score is adopted.

It is found that financial reporting for firms with purchased goodwill has become more conservative after the enactment of the new standard. However, once an increase in conservatism that is not attributable to new goodwill accounting is controlled for, it is found that accounting earnings for firms with purchased goodwill become less conservative.

The results should be interpreted with caution, because the effect of concurrent events other than the adoption of SFAS 142 on reported earnings is not perfectly controlled.

The results of this paper support Watts' assertion that new goodwill accounting impairs accounting earnings' ability to reflect the economic earnings in a timely manner, but these results should be interpreted with caution, as the main objective of goodwill accounting is not to improve accounting conservatism.

This paper makes a timely contribution to the debate of fair value accounting by focusing on the impact of SFAS 142 on the asymmetric timeliness of earnings. By employing all available firms with purchased goodwill balances rather than relying on firms that report impairment losses, our research design better captures the impact of SFAS 142 on financial reporting.

This paper aims to investigate whether the revised Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance in 2007 enhances earnings conservatism. In addition, the authors examine the relationship between board of directors’ expertise and conservatism. The third objective is to investigate the relationship between audit committee characteristics and earnings conservatism.

The sample of this study is based on 3,183 firm-year observations for a period of 2004-2009. The authors hand collected the corporate governance variables, whereas the remaining data were extracted from Compustat Global. The authors used two measures of conservatism. The first is the market-based model by Basu’s (1997), and the second measure is the accrual-based measure by Ball and Shivakumar (2005).

The authors find that the revision of Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance 2007 results in improving earnings conservatism. The authors find two audit committee characteristics, namely, audit committee financial expertise and independence increase earnings conservatism, after 2007. However, the authors could not find support whether board financial expertise mix affect conservatism.

This study did not consider other possible corporate governance variables that could influence earnings conservatism, as it would be a difficult task to gather them.

The authors provide evidence on the role of corporate governance and earnings conservatism in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the efficacy of the current legislative provisions that protect auditor independence in Australia. The collapses of several high-profile companies (Enron and WorldCom in the USA, HIH insurance and OneTel in Australia) in the early 2000s has raised questions about audit quality and independence. In response, regulators have introduced new regulations and guidance to improve audit quality. In Australia, the Corporations Act 2001 (2001) was amended via the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program Act 2004. This study poses the question: do non-audit service fees influence the level of accounting conservatism?

The sample used in this analysis consists of all available Australian listed companies from the years 2006 till 2010.

Using multiple measures of accounting conservatism and the auditor-client economic bond, our results suggest that the level of the economic bond between the auditor and the client does not significantly influence the level of accounting conservatism.

Our results demonstrate that the combination of intrinsic market mechanisms and regulation in Australia sufficiently protect auditor independence.

The asymmetric effect of conservatism on earnings and its other components serves as a contrivance to incorporate transparency and timeliness in financial reporting. This study aims to explore cash flow-return association, which provides insight into the accruals’ contribution that traverses through conservatism-earnings persistence liaison and its associated effects on stock returns.

The study used asymmetric timeliness (AT) model and two firm-year measures, namely, C-Score and conservatism ratio, to capture conservatism. The firm-year measures of conservatism, in addition to the AT measure, facilitate a better understanding of the persistence of reported earnings that branch out the study from the existing literature. Further, the study used panel regression analysis to evaluate the timeliness and persistence of earnings under the conservative approach with a sample of Indian corporate data from 2000 to 2017.

The findings of the study reveal that conservative earnings are less persistent and the accruals recognize bad news timelier than good news. The unfavorable change in earnings shows a lower earnings response coefficient in contrast to favorable earnings variations. However, the appropriate loss recognition nature of conservative reporting has little or no influence on stock returns in an emerging market such as India.

Accounting conservatism is a captivating feature accounting information, especially pertinent to many decision-makers. Thus, the study has implications for the investors while evaluating the adverse and positive changes in accounting earnings; also, the results are helpful for the standard setters in ongoing debate related to accounting conservatism vs fair evaluation. The present study focuses exclusively on ex-post conservatism, while the ex post and ex ante conservatism are having a significant role in accounting practices. Future research on the differential effects of ex post and ex ante conservatism on accounting information in an emerging market, is worth promising.

The study reveals the first Indian evidence on accounting conservatism and earnings persistence relationship, which would bring a different dimension to investors’ perception in evaluating the characteristic variations of reported earnings. The findings add value to the accounting standard setters concerning the asymmetric verification as Indian Accounting standards are on the verge of convergence with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Prior evidence suggests the existence of asymmetric timeliness in the reporting of good and bad news of firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether these results are consistent with inferences related to persistence property of earnings for firms that trade in the Athens Stock Exchange.

The research design employs both level regression specification and change regression specification and it is based on pool cross‐sectional regressions. Empirical results after classifying observations are reported based on both the sign of prior period and current period firms' return, while a number of sensitivity tests are employed.

According to prior evidence, bad news is recorded more timely than good news but in an unbiased and non‐conservative way. This implies that earnings shocks of firms with bad news should present persistence. Results from an ex‐ante perspective verify these arguments while results from an ex‐post perspective do not.

In contrast to other studies that report results that, in bad news periods, firms' earnings tend to present lower persistence than firms' earnings in good news periods, because managers conservatively report bad news, this paper focuses on a sample of firms that seems to report bad news in a timely way.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test the association between two ethnic groups: Bumiputera directors and Chinese directors, on the incidence of accounting conservatism.

A panel data analysis of financial statement data was conducted for 300 Malaysian listed firms between 2001 and 2007.

The analysis shows that the ethnic groups influence the adoption of conservatism, but that the evidence is mixed, implying that there could be factors other than ethnicity which explained the directors’ behaviour.

The results provide a useful input to the proponents of harmonisation in financial reporting, in that Malaysian financial reports do not appear to be influenced by the ethnicity of participating groups.

This is the first paper to measure empirically the impact of ethnicity on the incidence of accounting conservatism.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of cost stickiness on conditional conservatism.

The research sample consists of listed companies from 18 countries, using stock market indices of the BRICS, MIST, North Africa, USA and EU over the period ranging from 1997 to 2015. The authors use the firm-fixed effects method in the estimation of the models.

The results provide evidence of the existence of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism in the international context, using the Banker et al. (2016) model. They also argue that the conditional conservatism model (Basu, 1997) is overstated because it does not control for cost stickiness. In additional analyses, the authors conclude that the association between cost stickiness and accounting conservatism changes across country groups and across industries. The authors also document that the employee intensity and free cash-flow, as cost stickiness determinants, remain significant in the model including accounting conservatism. Moreover, the findings show that sticky cost behavior distorts inferences about standard demand drivers of conservatism such as leverage and size.

The findings are interesting and provide a better understanding of cost stickiness and conditional conservatism, and the interaction between these two phenomena in the international context, across country groups and across industries. To the best of the author’s knowledge, the study is the first one including free cash flow as a proxy for agency problem in the full model combining conservatism and cost stickiness models (Banker et al., 2016).

This study aims to examine the relationship between auditor tenure and conservatism for firms in Greece. Greece not only has a high incidence of earnings management but is also required under the new European Commission (EC) regulation to comply with mandatory auditor rotation. Therefore, Greece is an ideal setting in which to study the association between auditor tenure and accounting conservatism.

Similar to Jenkins and Velury (2008), this paper uses Basu’s (1997) asymmetrical timeliness of earnings as a measure of conservatism. Following Li (2010), the regression is re-estimated for subsamples based on client importance as measured by the ranking of client sales among all clients audited by the firm.

In contrast to Li (2010), the results of this study, which used a sample of firms in Greece, indicate that conservatism decreases as the auditor–client relationship lengthens. Client importance does not appear to affect the relationship between auditor tenure and conservatism, as measured by asymmetric timeliness of earnings. However, when using the accrual–cash flow measure of conservatism (Ball and Shivakumar, 2005), it is found that auditor tenure is positively (negatively) associated with conservatism for less (more) important clients. The results suggest that longer auditor tenure may have a negative impact on audit quality in certain countries where accounting quality has been found to be poor. Therefore, the new EC regulation requiring mandatory auditor rotation may in fact improve audit quality for firms in Greece.

This study’s sample consists of firms on the Athens Stock Exchange for the period of 1998-2011. This sample was purposely selected because of the unique conditions of rampant earnings management and low incentive in Greece for the auditors to exert effort to detect such practices. Moreover, Greece is subject to the new EC regulations requiring mandatory auditor rotation beginning in 2014. Future studies could examine this issue in alternate settings and over different time periods. Also, other cross-sectional variations among firms which affect the association between auditor–client tenure and audit quality may exist.

The findings are important to regulators such as the EC and indicate that Greece may be an appropriate setting in which to require mandatory auditor rotation. These results are also useful to auditors who wish to improve the audit quality and the public’s perception of their work.

Auditor tenure has been the subject of considerable debate, and regulators contend that long auditor tenure reduces audit quality. There may be a valid argument in favor of mandatory auditor rotation in countries particularly susceptible to low accounting quality due to issues such as rampant earnings management. Greece appears to be one such example, and this study provides support in favor of that argument by demonstrating that longer auditor tenure may lead to lower accounting quality in terms of conservatism. Therefore, the recent EC regulation may result in improved audit quality for firms in Greece.

This paper's aim is twofold: first, it seeks to examine the impact of financial transparency on the returns‐earnings relation and second, to test for the existence of conservative accounting between 1995 and 2004.

The data were collected from a sample of 105 non‐financial firms listed at the Athens Stock Exchange and were analyzed using ordinary least square (OLS) regression models.

Results indicated that conservative accounting is existent in the Greek accounting setting, but weak evidence regarding earnings timeliness was found. Additionally, evidence was found showing that disclosure improves earnings informativeness for firms with low conservatism but not in the case of firms with high timeliness. Overall the findings suggest that there are cases where better disclosure may not result on more informative stock prices.

The present study adds to the existing literature by examining the issue of timeliness and conservatism within the context of an emerging capital market like Greece. To the authors' knowledge, this the first study which considers the aforementioned issues in the Greek accounting setting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the convergence of IFRS in ASEAN countries resulted in an improvement in financial-reporting quality, and in particular with regards the degree of conditional conservatism of financial reporting. Then, the authors investigate whether the convergence to IFRS and the degree of conditional conservatism is influenced by corruption as a proxy for the strength of ASEAN jurisdiction legal and enforcement systems.

The sample of this study is based on 22,085 firm-year observations from three ASEAN countries, namely, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore from 2008 to 2014. This study employs a panel least square regression to test the effect of IFRS on two measures of conservatism which are asymmetric timeliness and accrual-based loss recognition. The conservatism data are extracted from ORBIS, while data for corruptions are extracted from Corruption Perception Index (CPI) that was released by Transparency International.

This study finds Convergence of IFRS enhance conditional conservatism. The findings are robust for two measures of conservatism which are asymmetric timeliness and accrual-based loss recognition. The result on unconditional conservatism finds that IFRS reduce unconditional conservatism, which supports that the code-law structures of the ASEAN countries as characterized by unconditional conservatism is reduced after IFRS convergence. A further test indicates that corruption reduces conditional conservatism in more corrupt countries.

This study focused on three ASEAN countries only, as they have consistent convergence dates to the IFRS. Therefore the result may not be generalized to other ASEAN countries.

The study provides implications to the regulators that IFRS enhance financial-reporting quality and reduce the randomness of decisions that are based on financial information as has been introduced by unconditional conservatism. Therefore it is important for the regulators to incorporate IFRS compliance into laws and regulations. Currently, IFRS compliance is not incorporated into laws and regulations for ASEAN countries, except for Malaysia. In Malaysia, Section 7 of the Financial Reporting Act 1997 (FRA) empowers the Malaysian Accounting Standards Board (MASB) to issue approved accounting standards for application in Malaysia. Under section 26D of the FRA, financial statements that are prepared or lodged with the Central Bank, Securities Commission or Registrar of Companies must comply with the standards issued by the MASB.

This paper extends the literature on the effect of IFRS on conservatism as it provides robust effect of IFRS on both conditional and unconditional conservatism. In addition, this study extends the literatures on the effect of corruptions in the relationship between IFRS and conditional conservatism.