Unexpected Accruals and Conditional Accounting Conservatism PDF Download
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Author: Jinhan Pae
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Languages : en
Pages :
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This paper examines the impact of management discretion over accruals on conditional accounting conservatism, defined as the tendency of accountants to recognize bad news on a timelier basis than good news. Prior research suggests that conditional accounting conservatism reflected in earnings is mainly due to the accrual component of earnings, not the cash flow component of earnings. After decomposing total accruals into expected and unexpected accruals, I find that (1) conditional accounting conservatism reflected in accruals is mainly due to unexpected accruals; (2) the negative association between unconditional and conditional accounting conservatism is mainly attributable to unexpected accruals; and (3) firms with higher leverage exhibit conditionally more conservative accounting primarily through unexpected accruals. These results are robust to accrual models that take into account the systematic association between accruals and cash flows and their non-linearity, and to the asymmetric persistence of earnings changes specification of conditional accounting conservatism. Taken together, these results suggest that managers exercise their discretion over accruals to expedite the recognition of bad news rather than good news.
Author: Jinhan Pae
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This paper examines the impact of management discretion over accruals on conditional accounting conservatism, defined as the tendency of accountants to recognize bad news on a timelier basis than good news. Prior research suggests that conditional accounting conservatism reflected in earnings is mainly due to the accrual component of earnings, not the cash flow component of earnings. After decomposing total accruals into expected and unexpected accruals, I find that (1) conditional accounting conservatism reflected in accruals is mainly due to unexpected accruals; (2) the negative association between unconditional and conditional accounting conservatism is mainly attributable to unexpected accruals; and (3) firms with higher leverage exhibit conditionally more conservative accounting primarily through unexpected accruals. These results are robust to accrual models that take into account the systematic association between accruals and cash flows and their non-linearity, and to the asymmetric persistence of earnings changes specification of conditional accounting conservatism. Taken together, these results suggest that managers exercise their discretion over accruals to expedite the recognition of bad news rather than good news.
Author: Daniel W. Collins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
We investigate the impact of conditional conservation on the ability of accruals and its components to predict future cash flows. We first demonstrate that conditional conservatism has increased over the period from 1988 to 2013 due to an increase in timely loss recognition and asymmetric timely loss recognition. We find that while conditional conservatism that is manifest in both special-item and non-special-item accruals has increased over time, the temporal increase in conservatism is primarily attributable to non-special-item accruals. Next, we show that the increase in timely loss recognition is associated with an increase in the ability of accrual components to predict future cash flows in periods of bad news, consistent with asymmetric timely loss recognition increasing the ability of accruals to predict future cash flows. These findings stand in contrast to the belief that conditional conservatism reduces the valuation role of GAAP earnings as some have claimed.
Author: Julia Nasev
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3834984582
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
Julia Nasev examines the impact of conservative accounting numbers on valuation estimates and on real economic decisions such as cost stickiness.
Author: Timothy Bryan
Publisher: Dissertation Discovery Company
ISBN: 9780530008400
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Abstract: This paper empirically examines the relationship between conservatism and earnings management in chemical and allied products manufacturers via an analysis of the allowance for doubtful accounts and bad debt expense. Results indicate that the allowance for doubtful accounts is overstated and has become more overstated since 2004. In addition, results show that firms utilized the excessive conservatism to manage earnings to achieve earnings goals throughout the study period. An important overall inference from these results is that the traditional view of the allowance for doubtful accounts as unconditional conservatism is, in fact, conditional conservatism. Dissertation Discovery Company and Jacksonville University are dedicated to making scholarly works more discoverable and accessible throughout the world. This dissertation, "Accounting Conservatism or Earnings Management" by Timothy Gordon Bryan, was obtained from Jacksonville University and is being sold with permission from the author. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation.
Author: Jumpei Nishitani
Publisher:
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Languages : en
Pages :
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This paper examines the relationship between two salient features embedded in the modern financial accounting information system: accrual reversal and accounting conservatism. This relationship is analyzed using a moral hazard model in a single-period setting and two types of two-period models: pooling and separating. When the effect of accrual reversal is considered in the long term, accounting conservatism as an information bias was found to be an optimal choice for the principal in a two-separating-period setting, particularly when business risk is high and/or the informativeness of the accounting information system is low; however, accounting conservatism could never be used as an information bias under a single-period or two-pooling-period settings, even with limited liability conditions. These findings indicate that accrual reversal could be considered a driving force for conditional accounting conservatism, but not for unconditional conservatism. Moreover, accrual reversal may provide an explanation for the seemingly contradictory behavior of accounting standard-setting bodies that introduced conditional conservatism, although expressing negative attitudes toward accounting conservatism.
Author: Jennifer Francis
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
ISBN: 1601981147
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 97
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Book Description
This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.
Author: Juan Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This paper investigates how accounting rule reform affects the usage of conditional conservatism in the property-liability (P&L) insurance industry. More specifically, whether the accounting rule changes that strengthen the internal control over financial reporting and improve the financial reporting transparency reduce insurers' incentives for conservatively reserving. The P&L insurance industry is a perfect setting for studying accruals and accounting conservatism because it has specific and detailed firm-year level data about loss accrual development. We develop a new method of assessing conditional conservatism, measuring it as the concavity of an insurer's loss development curve. We study the U.S. domiciled P&L insurance companies from 1995 to 2015. Using a diff-in-diff identification strategy, we find that the level of conditional conservatism is significantly reduced after the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) Section 404 and the Model Audit Rule (MAR), both of which increased board oversight of internal risk management. Our result indicates that complying with additional disclosure requirements reduces P&L insurers' incentives to use conditional conservatism to mitigate regulatory monitoring costs. With fewer reserves, insurers may become less resistant to unexpected or catastrophic losses and face greater insolvency risk. The paper's results also shed light on the question of which should be an appropriate measure of financial reporting quality given a goal of reducing bankruptcy risk: transparency and accuracy or conservatism.
Author: Jonas Gut
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Languages : en
Pages :
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The focus of this thesis is on the measurement of earnings management and in particular on the measurement of accounting conservatism. One of its main contributions is an overview showing which recent empirical studies apply which measures of conservatism, indicating the metrics' relative importance and their status among researchers. In the second part, I test three of these measures - the market-to-book ratio, nonoperating accruals, and total accruals - for their ability to explain earnings management proxied by discretionary accruals obtained from the Modified Jones Model. I find that the explanatory power of the total accruals measure is the highest, followed by the nonoperating accruals measure and the market-to-book ratio. Other results implicate that a higher level of conservatism usually has a positive (negative) influence on income-decreasing (-increasing) earnings management and that the influence of conservatism on income-decreasing earnings management is stronger than on income-increasing earnings management. Thereby, this part of my thesis links previous findings on the interaction between accounting conservatism and earnings management to several measures (or calculation modes) of the two phenomena and enables a better understanding of their functionality.
Author: Bikki Jaggi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 53
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Accounting conservatism has been recognized as a reporting strategy that benefits shareholders and financial statement users. We hypothesize that managers in general are likely to sacrifice the benefit associated with accounting conservatism when adopting meeting/beating market expectations (hereafter MBME). Our findings show a negative association between MBME, proxied by analysts' consensus forecasts, and accounting conservatism, defined in terms of conditional conservatism (Basu, 1997; Ball and Shivakumar, 2005, 2006) and we show that such relationship is not a mechanical connection between reporting strategy and managerial incentives to report higher earnings. Further analysis show that the negative relationship still exists after controlling for expectation as well as accrual-based and real earnings management. However, we document that G-index (Gompers et al., 2003), reflecting corporate governance in terms of anti-takeover provisions, has a significant impact on the negative association between accounting conservatism and MBME. Such finding shows that firms with less anti-takeover provisions, proxied by G-index, are less likely to sacrifice the benefit associated with conservative accounting for MBME.
Author: Juan Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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This dissertation has three chapters studying accounting conservatism in the property-liability (P&L) insurance industry. There are two types of accounting conservatism - ex-ante (unconditional) conservatism and ex-post (conditional) conservatism. The former means that firms over-report liabilities initially, before more detailed information becomes available. The latter means that firms respond to this new information asymmetrically by recognizing expected losses more quickly than expected gains. My analysis throughout the dissertation focuses on the loss reserve accruals since it is the most significant accruals on the balance sheet. One benefit of studying the P&L insurance industry is that we have specific and detailed information regarding the development of loss reserve accruals over time. Chapter 1 is an executive summary of the next two chapters, highlighting the key results, the policy implications, and the contributions of the dissertation. Chapter 2 studies the two types of accounting conservatism and explore three research questions: (1) whether ex-ante and ex-post conservatism prevails in the P&L insurance industry; (2) what the relations are between ex-post conservatism and other managerial incentives including ex-ante conservatism; and (3) how much the opportunity cost is for being conservative. I study all U.S. domiciled P&L insurance companies from 1996 to 2012 and follow the previous literature to measure accounting conservatism in Chapter 2. I find that both types of accounting conservatism prevail in the insurance industry. Besides, the back-of-the-envelope estimates based on the industry average insurer indicate that their opportunity costs are trivial compared to the amounts of net income and total assets. Chapter 2 also shows that the practices of ex-ante and ex-post conservatism exhibit a nonlinear, U-shape relationship. This finding supports the view that the two types of conservatism can be compliments because they can serve for different purposes. Ex-ante conservatism is mainly used to create a cushion against future unexpected losses, whereas ex-post conservatism can reduce informational frictions. In Chapter 3, I develop a new method of assessing conditional conservatism using more detailed data from the insurance industry. I look at how conditional conservatism affects insolvency risk and the financial strength rating of P&L insurance companies. I also investigate how a change to accounting rules affects conditional conservatism. The new method of measuring conditional conservatism is based on the concavity of the loss development curve. I study all U.S. domiciled P&L insurance companies from 1995 to 2015 and find that the greater the degree of conditional conservatism, the lower is insolvency probability, and the better is the financial strength rating, with other things being constant. The result indicates that regulators and rating agencies do reward insurers that voluntarily utilize conditional conservatism accounting strategy. Moreover, I find that the level of conditional conservatism is reduced after the enactment of the Model Audit Rule (MAR). MAR, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404, increased board oversight of internal risk management. The result suggests that complying with additional disclosure requirements provides a "safe harbor" for insurance companies so that they have fewer incentives to be conditionally conservative.
