회계보수주의가 시장기대치 달성에 미치는 영향

This paper investigates the effect of accounting conservatism on meeting or beating market’s earnings expectation. Prior research generally documents that managers manipulate earnings to beat market expectation. However, few studies explore the impact of accounting conservatism on beating earnings benchmark. The analyses of current study fill this gap by showing that increase (decrease) in the levels of accounting conservatism reduces (inclines) the likelihood of meeting or beating earnings expectation. Thus, managers use their discretion when choosing the level of accounting conservatism to adopt market expectation. The results are consistent in the use of both market-based and accrual-based accounting conservatism. Also, the evidences from using analyst consensus forecast, prior year’s earnings, zero earnings as market expectations all show qualitatively consistent results. Furthermore, the negative relation between accounting conservatism and meeting or beating market’s earnings expectation is more pronounced in the presence of lower financial statement comparability. It can be interpreted that for firms with comparable accounting information, analysts disclose more optimistic (pessimistic) earnings forecast when their firms report less (more) conservative earnings, thereby lowers the possibility to beat earnings benchmark. Lastly, the results are consistent for the two-stage regression test and change test suggesting that the evidences of this paper are robust to potential endogeneity concern.