Taiwan is an economy with an efficient stock market where accounting and auditing standards generally follow the US. However, a culturally different climate is caused by the predominance of family-owned public companies. We find Taiwanese firms' earnings exhibit the conservatism and timeliness...

We argue that accounting conservatism makes earnings forecasting difficult by introducing transitory components in reported earnings. These transitory components are likely to be disproportionately represented in firms reporting losses. We show that analysts' mean forecast errors and absolute...

Conditional conservatism is an integral but often unmodeled part of the normal accrual process. The standard economic determinants of accruals contain information about unrealized losses. We argue that accountants recognize these unrealized losses as disaggregated write-downs for small asset...

We study the influence of bank competition on U.S. public borrowers' accounting conservatism by exploiting the staggered adoption of the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) of 1994, which increased the threat of new bank entrants and competition. We find that...

Auditors’ legal liability incentives to be conservative cause fourth quarter earnings to differ systematically from interim quarter earnings. We show that the frequencies and average magnitudes of losses, negative extraordinary items, negative special items and negative discontinued operations...