Search results

Prior studies have found that managers adjust operational activities to tackle climate risk. However, the effects of climate risk on accounting practices are largely ignored in the literature. This paper investigates whether and how climate risk influences managers’ decision-making on the level of accounting conservatism and explains the results based on two competing channels: valuation demand and contracting demand.

Using firm level climate risk measures, we build a modified Basu (1997) model to conduct our econometric tests. In the baseline model, we use earnings before extraordinary items as the dependent variable, referred to as the earnings model. We control for different levels of fixed effect to identify the shocks of climate risk and mitigate potential concerns on endogeneity and bias in the model. A series of robustness tests provide supporting evidence for our baseline results and our explanation.

Using a sample of 35,832 firm-year observations on listed US firms over the period 2002 to 2019, we find that the perception of climate risk drives managers to choose the less conservative accounting policies. We conclude that the results are consistent with the valuation demand explanation but inconsistent with the contracting demand explanation.

The study provides additional evidence on how managers respond to climate risk by adjusting their corporate polices, specifically accounting policies. Our findings contradict the results of prior studies. We explain our results from a unique perspective. Overall, the study provides valuable insights for academics, investors, managers and policymakers.

This study examines the implications of real asset liquidity for accounting conservatism. We investigate whether the liquidity of a firm’s physical assets mitigates lenders’ demand for conservatism by increasing the amount lenders can recover if the firm is liquidated, a theoretical prediction in Göx and Wagenhofer (2009).

We use an asset redeployability index as a proxy for firm-level real (physical) asset liquidity and adopt ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions in the test. We also investigate the differential impact of real asset liquidity on conservatism in two unique settings where lenders’ demand for accounting conservatism varies (loan initiation and bank deregulation).

We find that accounting conservatism decreases as real asset liquidity increases. The negative effect of real asset liquidity on conservatism increases as the quantity of the firm’s real assets increases, and the negative association is strengthened when firms face high financing constraints and have access to public debt markets. The moderating effect of real asset liquidity on lenders’ demand for conservatism increases (decreases) when real asset liquidity is more (less) important to lenders.

This study provides direct empirical evidence for the theoretical prediction in Göx and Wagenhofer (2009). Prior research shows that real asset liquidity impacts a firm’s capital structure and investment decisions (Campello and Giambona, 2013; Kim and Kung, 2017; Ortiz-Molina and Phillips, 2014; Williamson, 1988). We complement this literature by providing evidence that real asset liquidity also plays a role in financial reporting by reducing accounting conservatism.

We examine the association between conditional conservatism in initial public offering (IPO) underpricing and post-issue stock market survival in the U.S.

We adopt an archival approach by collecting data for 1,761 U.S. IPO issuers for the period 1990–2017. Regression analyses are conducted to evaluate the association between conditional conservatism in initial public offerings with underpricing and post-issue stock market survival. We identify firms that went public in the period 1990–2012. These firms are then followed for five years after the IPO to assess their stock market survival.

We find that pre-issue conditional conservatism is significantly associated with less IPO underpricing. We also detect that IPO firms with higher levels of conditional conservative reporting are more likely to survive in the post-IPO stock market in the three-, four-, and five-year periods after the IPO. Our main findings are robust after controlling for other factors in our models, such as IPO cycles, venture capitalists, research and development investment, and pre-IPO accounting performance.

We extend research by demonstrating that conditional conservative reporting practices help firms reduce their indirect costs of raising their initial public capital. Additionally, our research introduces new evidence on the association between pre-IPO conditional conservatism and after-issue stock market survival. Our findings empirically support the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) decision to reintroduce the concept of prudence into the conceptual framework, by showing how conservative reporting can reduce information asymmetry in IPO firms.

This paper uses test panel data for the biggest companies listed on the boards of directors of the Palestine Stock Exchange from 2016 to 2022 and will focus on the relationship between the corporate governance index, accounting conservatism, and the comprehensive index of corporate governance.

The relationship between corporate governance and accounting conservatism is experimentally investigated for its impact on the likelihood of stock price breakdown and decline among companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange between 2016 and 2022, using a mixed utilities approach.

The findings demonstrated the adverse correlation between corporate governance, accounting conservatism, and stock prices. Higher levels of corporate governance can effectively reduce the likelihood of future stock price increases, while conservative accounting policies can effectively prevent stock price collapses in these listed companies. Higher levels of corporate governance can greatly lessen the detrimental effect of accounting conservatism on the likelihood of future stock price breakdowns and declines. Both accounting conservatism and corporate governance have substitution effects in decreasing the danger of stock price collapse.

The limitations of the current research are that higher levels of corporate governance can significantly reduce the harmful effect of accounting conservatism on the probability of stock price breakdown and decline in the future on the study sample used, and these results cannot be generalized to all company stocks that were excluded in this study. The last research limitation is that the sample size of this study is somewhat small, and therefore the effects of the results cannot be used on all unlisted companies, and they cannot be generalized to all of these companies except only to companies listed on the Palestine Stock Exchange.

Our findings have interesting managerial and policy implications. Listed firms should first strengthen external audit oversight, improve the method of disclosing accounting information, and improve the system architecture to raise the level of accounting conservatism. Moreover, it is imperative to enhance and improve the ownership structure of publicly traded firms, construct a robust mechanism for replacing shareholders, fortify the duties of the board of directors, proficiently fulfil the role of independent directors, and develop and refine the internal and external framework for corporate governance.

This study provides insights about reducing the probability of a stock market breakdown and collapse from two sides: enhancing corporate governance, improving accounting conservatism, enhancing the reliability and integrity of disclosure, and growing the number of sustainable disclosures. These suggestions can also be used as a template for Palestine's capital market's gradual and sustainable expansion.

This paper aims to provide deeper insights into the relationship between board gender diversity (BGD) and accounting conservatism by exploring the mediating role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) underlying this relationship.

The authors sample 10,252 firm-year observations from 932 publicly listed firms in 15 European countries over the 2010–2020 period. The authors conduct several models for panel data, applying mediation mechanisms, the Heckman two-stage model and the generalized method of moments and instrumental variable regressions to test the research hypotheses and account for endogeneity problems as well as unobservable heterogeneity.

Based on an integrated theoretical framework that draws insights from agency, resource dependence and stakeholder theories, the authors establish a positive and significant relationship between BGD and accounting conservatism, which is significantly mediated by CSR. The authors provide empirical evidence for the prior inconsistent results on the gender diversity-conservative accounting link and suggest that BGD promotes effective corporate governance and enhances CSR performance, which in turn, leads to higher conservatism in financial reporting.

The findings have important implications for regulators, policymakers and managers in understanding the drivers to ensure and control the quality of financial reporting. The results alert firms to the need to focus not only on the importance of BGD but also on CSR activities to ensure higher earnings reporting quality.

The results are significant in encouraging a higher presence of women on corporate boards, enhancing CSR performance and drawing social attention to mitigating earnings management practices through higher conservatism in financial reporting.

This paper recognized a gap in the literature not yet examined and contributed to the body of knowledge through the mediating role of CSR in the relationship between gender diversity and accounting conservatism.

This study aims to examine the impact of economic, environmental and social (EES) indicators of sustainability performance on accounting conservatism and the moderating effect of good corporate governance (GCG) on this relationship in European environmental, social and governance (ESG) firms.

To test the study’s hypotheses, this paper applied linear regressions with panel data from 136 European companies selected from the ESG index between 2015 and 2022.

The results show a positive effect of economic and environmental sustainability scores on the accounting conservatism level. However, social score has a negative and significant effect on the level of accounting conservatism. The findings also show that GCG accentuates these effects.

The findings have several implications for companies, investors and academic researchers. For companies, EES reporting should be enhanced. For investors, sustainability performance is crucial in decision-making. The results show that exploring the interaction between sustainability performance scores and accounting conservatism is essential for academic researchers.

This paper is motivated by the limited research on EES sustainability scores and accounting conservatism around GCG, hence its pertinence for companies seeking to improve information quality.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the importance and status of conditional accounting conservatism indicators and financial flexibility for the management of legal claims of the company during the outbreak of Corona.

The research method was implemented using statistical analysis in the SPSS environment. The participants of this research can be experts and specialists working in companies admitted to the stock exchange and expert professors in accounting fields; auditing; economy; financial engineering and financial management, categorized. The data related to the localization tool of research variables were collected by snowball sampling method in the summer of 2022.

One of the main results of the research is that based on the opinions and professional experience of experts and professionals working in companies admitted to the stock exchange and academic experts, within a range of seven, “The number of legal claims of the company with electronic businesses” under the title of the main indicator in the legal claims of the company in the outbreak of Corona from the importance dimension; “Exchange rate fluctuations in financial resilience” under the title of the main indicator in financial resilience in the Corona outbreak from the functional dimension; “The number of legal claims of the company with government institutions” under the title of the main indicator in the company’s legal claims in the Corona outbreak from the functional dimension; “The company’s conservatism score” under the title of the main indicator in the conditional conservatism of accounting in the Corona outbreak from the functional dimension; “oil price fluctuations in financial resilience” under the title of the main indicator in financial resilience in the Corona outbreak from the importance dimension; and “type of industry based on total assets” under the title of the main indicator in the conditional conservatism of accounting in the Corona outbreak was calculated from the importance dimension.

Although the previous literature has studied the direct correlation between accounting conservatism and financial flexibility, this work focuses on examining the direct association between accounting conservatism and financial flexibility in the post-Corona era and is carried out to resolve legal claims.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between accounting conservatism and pledging of shares by controlling shareholders of a firm to obtain a loan. The pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders of a firm results in alterations to the payoff and risk structure for these shareholders. Since accounting numbers have valuation implications, pledging of shares by a controlling shareholder has an impact on accounting policy choices made by the firm. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of controlling shareholder share pledging to obtain a loan on a specific accounting policy choice, namely, conservatism.

The paper uses a large data set from India comprising 14,786 firm years consisting of 1,570 firms belonging to 58 industries for a period of 11 years (2009–2019). The authors use ordinary least square regression with robust standard errors. The authors conduct robustness checks and the results are consistent across alternative statistical methodologies and alternative measures of the primary dependent and independent variables.

The primary results show that pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders results in higher conditional conservatism and lower unconditional conservatism. Further analysis reveals that the relationship is stronger when the controlling shareholder holds a majority ownership in the firm. Additionally, the results show that for business group affiliated firms, which are unique to developing countries, both the conditional and the unconditional conservatism are incrementally lower when the controlling shareholder pledges the shares. For family firms with a family member as CEO, the conditional conservatism is incrementally higher and the unconditional conservatism is incrementally lower. Finally, the authors show that the results hold when the pledge intensity variable is measured with a one-year lag and finally, the authors show that conditional conservatism is incrementally higher in the year of the increase in the pledge and the year after, but there is no such incremental impact on unconditional conservatism.

The research is limited to the listed firms in India. Since majority of the listed firms are controlled by families and the family firms around the world are heterogeneous the findings of the research may not be applicable to other countries.

The study has implications for policy-making and monitoring of the pledging by the controlling shareholders. It also helps the investors in making investment decisions with respect to family firms in India.

The study is unique as it focuses on the relationship between pledging of shares by the controlling shareholders and its impact on accounting conservatism. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research integrating these two aspects.

The authors examine the effect of climate risk on accounting conservatism for a sample of listed companies operating in 26 developing countries.

The authors employ the Climate Risk Index (CRI) developed by Germanwatch to capture the severity of losses due to extreme weather events at the country level. The authors use different approaches to measure firm-level accounting conservatism.

The authors find that greater climate risk leads to a lower level of accounting conservatism. The results hold even after using different estimation methods.

Although the authors' analysis is limited to the period 2007–2016, it could be helpful for standard setters such as International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and International Sustainable Standards Board (ISSB) as they may consider the potential effect of climate risk in their international standards.

The negative impacts of climate risk on the quality of financial reporting as proxied by accounting conservatism could trigger regulators and standard setters to require disclosure of information relating to climate risks and to incorporate climate-related risks in their risk management systems. In addition, for policymakers, incorporating accounting conservatism as a financial quality reporting standard could help promote greater transparency, accuracy and reliability in financial reporting in the context of climate risk.

The authors add to the literature on international differences in accounting conservatism by showing that climate risk significantly affects unconditional and conditional conservatism. The authors' results provide fresh evidence of the dark side of climate change. That is, climate risk is shown to decrease financial reporting quality.

Our study aims to explore the ownership structure and accounting conservatism in influencing the value relevance that we analyse through the paradigm of open innovation and socio-emotional wealth (SEW). We also extended the test to identify how firm size could affect value relevance.

Through panel data testing, we collected all issuers on the stock exchange for the 2016–2018 period. The total collected observations are 735 observations from various industries.

The results of the study provide empirical evidence that institutional ownership is more pronounce, especially in companies with high asset levels. We also conducted other tests to see it from the perspective of SEW. We divide companies into family and non-family companies. The results of this study indicate that institutional ownership has an effect on increasing value relevance, especially in family companies compared with non-family companies. The results of the study also indicate that accounting conservatism plays a more important role in increasing value relevance in non-family firms compared to family firms.

This study advances in two main ways. First, we use a SEW approach and an open innovation perspective. Second, we conducted tests for family and non-family firms.