IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jmgtgv/v25y2021i2d10.1007_s10997-020-09524-y.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Board monitoring efficiency and the value of conservative accounting

Author

Listed:
  • Yanmin Gao

    (Thompson Rivers University)

  • Alfred Wagenhofer

    (University of Graz)

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the observation that firms with strong corporate governance exhibit more conservative accounting. We study one of a board’s most important decisions: to retain or replace the incumbent manager. The board uses accounting information and additional information from costly board monitoring. We show that if the accounting information is useful only for the replacement decision, then conservatism is harmful because it leads to too much replacement. If accounting information is relevant for the board’s decision whether to monitor, then conservatism is beneficial when the board is a sufficiently efficient monitor. We also provide several predictions for empirical tests.

Suggested Citation

  • Yanmin Gao & Alfred Wagenhofer, 2021. "Board monitoring efficiency and the value of conservative accounting," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 25(2), pages 321-345, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:jmgtgv:v:25:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10997-020-09524-y
    DOI: 10.1007/s10997-020-09524-y
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10997-020-09524-y
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10997-020-09524-y?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lixiong Guo & Ronald W. Masulis, 2015. "Board Structure and Monitoring: New Evidence from CEO Turnovers," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(10), pages 2770-2811.
    2. George Drymiotes & Konduru Sivaramakrishnan, 2012. "Board Monitoring, Consulting, and Reward Structures," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(2), pages 453-486, June.
    3. Hermalin, Benjamin E & Weisbach, Michael S, 1998. "Endogenously Chosen Boards of Directors and Their Monitoring of the CEO," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(1), pages 96-118, March.
    4. Jing LI, 2013. "Accounting Conservatism and Debt Contracts: Efficient Liquidation and Covenant Renegotiation," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 30(3), pages 1082-1098, September.
    5. Juan Manuel Garcia Lara & Beatriz Garcia Osma & Fernando Penalva, 2007. "Board of Directors' Characteristics and Conditional Accounting Conservatism: Spanish Evidence," European Accounting Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(4), pages 727-755.
    6. Fernando Penalva & Alfred Wagenhofer, 2019. "Conservatism in debt contracting: theory and empirical evidence," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(6), pages 619-647, September.
    7. Armstrong, Christopher S. & Guay, Wayne R. & Weber, Joseph P., 2010. "The role of information and financial reporting in corporate governance and debt contracting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2-3), pages 179-234, December.
    8. Wendy Beekes & Peter Pope & Steven Young, 2004. "The Link Between Earnings Timeliness, Earnings Conservatism and Board Composition: evidence from the UK," Corporate Governance: An International Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(1), pages 47-59, January.
    9. Volker Laux, 2008. "Board Independence and CEO Turnover," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(1), pages 137-171, March.
    10. Gopal V. Krishnan & Gnanakumar Visvanathan, 2008. "Does the SOX Definition of an Accounting Expert Matter? The Association between Audit Committee Directors' Accounting Expertise and Accounting Conservatism," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 25(3), pages 827-858, September.
    11. Qintao Fan & Xiao†Jun Zhang, 2012. "Accounting Conservatism, Aggregation, and Information Quality," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(1), pages 38-56, March.
    12. Frank Gigler & Chandra Kanodia & Haresh Sapra & Raghu Venugopalan, 2009. "Accounting Conservatism and the Efficiency of Debt Contracts," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(3), pages 767-797, June.
    13. Bushman, Robert M. & Smith, Abbie J., 2001. "Financial accounting information and corporate governance," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1-3), pages 237-333, December.
    14. Jensen, Michael C. & Meckling, William H., 1976. "Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 305-360, October.
    15. Jie Joyce Tian, 2014. "Board Monitoring and Endogenous Information Asymmetry," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 31(1), pages 136-151, March.
    16. Jeremy Bertomeu & Masako Darrough & Wenjie Xue, 2017. "Optimal Conservatism with Earnings Manipulation," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 34(1), pages 252-284, March.
    17. Anne Beyer & Ilan Guttman & Iván Marinovic, 2014. "Optimal Contracts with Performance Manipulation," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(4), pages 817-847, September.
    18. Ahmed, Anwer S. & Duellman, Scott, 2007. "Accounting conservatism and board of director characteristics: An empirical analysis," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2-3), pages 411-437, July.
    19. Ramji Balakrishnan & George Drymiotes & Konduru Sivaramakrishnan, 2019. "The Effects of Biasing Performance Measurement Systems on Incentives and Retention Decisions," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 36(2), pages 1098-1121, June.
    20. Judson Caskey & Volker Laux, 2017. "Corporate Governance, Accounting Conservatism, and Manipulation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(2), pages 424-437, February.
    21. Hao Li, 2001. "A Theory of Conservatism," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(3), pages 617-636, June.
    22. Benjamin E. Hermalin, 2005. "Trends in Corporate Governance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(5), pages 2351-2384, October.
    23. Ramalingegowda, Santhosh & Yu, Yong, 2012. "Institutional ownership and conservatism," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 98-114.
    24. Philip Brown & Wendy Beekes & Peter Verhoeven, 2011. "Corporate governance, accounting and finance: A review," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 51(1), pages 96-172, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paweł Mielcarz & Dmytro Osiichuk & Karolina Puławska, 2023. "Increasing shareholder focus: the repercussions of the 2015 corporate governance reform in Japan," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 27(3), pages 1017-1047, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sudipta Basu & Yi Liang, 2019. "Director–Liability–Reduction Laws and Conditional Conservatism," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(4), pages 889-917, September.
    2. Judson Caskey & Volker Laux, 2017. "Corporate Governance, Accounting Conservatism, and Manipulation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(2), pages 424-437, February.
    3. Khalifa, Mariem & Trabelsi, Samir & Matoussi, Hamadi, 2022. "Leverage, R&D expenditures, and accounting conservatism: Evidence from technology firms," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 285-304.
    4. Haider, Imran & Singh, Harjinder & Sultana, Nigar, 2021. "Managerial ability and accounting conservatism," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1).
    5. Richard Barker & Anne McGeachin, 2015. "An Analysis of Concepts and Evidence on the Question of Whether IFRS Should be Conservative," Abacus, Accounting Foundation, University of Sydney, vol. 51(2), pages 169-207, June.
    6. Ha, Joohyung & Feng, Mingming, 2018. "Conditional conservatism and labor investment efficiency," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 143-163.
    7. Laux, Christian & Laux, Volker, 2024. "Accounting conservatism and managerial information acquisition," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2).
    8. Laux, Volker & Ray, Korok, 2020. "Effects of accounting conservatism on investment efficiency and innovation," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1).
    9. Amneh Alkurdi & Munther Al-Nimer & Mohammad Dabaghia, 2017. "Accounting Conservatism and Ownership Structure Effect: Evidence from Industrial and Financial Jordanian Listed Companies," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(2), pages 608-619.
    10. Rahimah Mohamed Yunos Author_Email: rahim221@johor.uitm.edu.my & Malcolm Smith & Zubaidah Ismail & Syahrul Ahmar Ahmad, 2011. "Inside Concentrated Owners, Board Of Directors And Accounting Conservatism," Annual Summit on Business and Entrepreneurial Studies (ASBES 2011) Proceeding 2011-053-178, Conference Master Resources.
    11. Gerald J. Lobo & Ashok Robin & Kean Wu, 2020. "Share repurchases and accounting conservatism," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 699-733, February.
    12. Naeem Tabassum & Satwinder Singh, 2020. "Corporate Governance and Organisational Performance," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-3-030-48527-6, June.
    13. Henrique Castro Martins & Cristiano Machado Costa, 2020. "Does control concentration affect board busyness? International evidence," Journal of Management & Governance, Springer;Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA), vol. 24(3), pages 821-850, September.
    14. Armstrong, Christopher S. & Guay, Wayne R. & Weber, Joseph P., 2010. "The role of information and financial reporting in corporate governance and debt contracting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(2-3), pages 179-234, December.
    15. Araceli Mora & Martin Walker, 2015. "The implications of research on accounting conservatism for accounting standard setting," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(5), pages 620-650, August.
    16. Ahsan Habib & Md. Borhan Uddin Bhuiyan, 2016. "Problem directors on the audit committee and financial reporting quality," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(2), pages 121-144, February.
    17. Pierre Chaigneau & Nicolas Sahuguet, 2023. "The Complementarity Between Signal Informativeness and Monitoring," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(1), pages 141-185, March.
    18. Liu, Sun, 2019. "The impact of ownership structure on conditional and unconditional conservatism in China: Some new evidence," Journal of International Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 49-68.
    19. Katolnik, Svetlana & Kukec, Sandra K. & Schöndube, Jens Robert, 2015. "Board Incentives and Board Independence in Dynamic Agency," Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) dp-567, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät.
    20. Dariush Foroghi & Hadi Amiri & Zahra Nokhbeh Fallah, 2013. "Corporate Governance and Conservatism," International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, vol. 3(4), pages 61-71, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Conservative accounting; Corporate governance; Board of directors; Board monitoring; Management replacement;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • M41 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Accounting
    • G34 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Mergers; Acquisitions; Restructuring; Corporate Governance
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jmgtgv:v:25:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10997-020-09524-y. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.