보수주의가 회계정보 유용성에 미치는 영향

This study investigates whether accounting conservatism has an impact on firms’ information asymmetry and the heterogeneity in investors’ interpretation. Some researches argue that accounting conservatism plays a role in enhancing the quality of accounting information and protecting investors. On the other hand, other researches point out that conservatism may distort accounting information because of its asymmetric timeliness between good and bad news. We find that accounting conservatism raises both stock price reaction to earnings announcement and trading volume reaction to stock price. It means that investors identify the existence of accounting conservatism and that stock prices reflect the unrecognized earnings by conservatism. However, accounting conservatism also makes investors more confused in figuring out its meaning, resulting in larger amount of trading volume. In addition, we test how accounting conservatism affects the analysts’ forecast accuracy and the dispersion. The results indicate that conservative accounting aggravates analysts’ forecasts accuracy and expands the dispersion. This implies that analysts have difficulties in reflecting the magnitude of conservatism in earnings forecasts and that accounting conservatism increases heterogeneity among analysts. This study shows that accounting conservatism leads to greater information asymmetry and makes the interpretation on the accounting information more heterogeneous. Our findings suggest that we need to be more careful when using accounting conservatism as a proxy of earnings quality because of its complexity.