We examine the tradeoff between having affiliated bankers on board and conservative accounting for mitigating debtholder-shareholder conflicts. We argue that affiliated bankers on board provide lenders with private information and control rights, thereby lowering debtcontracting demand for conservatism in public financial reports. We find that firms with affiliated bankers on board have lower c...

We examine the effect of lending banks’ board representation (affiliated banker on board, or AFB) on conservative accounting. We argue that private information obtained through board representation enhances the monitoring and the influence of lenders and therefore reduces their demand for conservatism-facilitated debt contracting. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that conservatism is mar...

Although internal control over financial reporting has gained increasing regulatory attention, its enforcement is far from perfect; thus, firm-specific incentives to management become important increase the quality of reports. We study how owners can motivate managers invest in accounting even though it costly managers. Using an agency model, we establish that a sufficiently conservative system...

A principal-agent relationship exists among creditors, shareholders and management, and information asymmetry among them leads to asymmetric loss functions, which induces conservative accounting. This paper investigates the determinants of accounting conservatism using accrual-based measures and data from 2001 to 2006 in China. We find that a higher degree of leverage, lower level of control of...

The phenomenon of the financial crisis is not a new phenomenon around the world. The structure of an economy or a set of economies may face a financial crisis. In fact, it is deformation, dimensions, causes and roots of the financial crisis which create a state of change from this crisis. Recently, evidence has shown that the market value of firms subject to bankruptcy is significantly reduced....

This paper studies the joint effect of conservatism and aggregation on the cost of equity capital and the efficiency of debt contracts. In the model, a firm’s two assets are valued at either the lower-of-cost-or-market or fair value and the accounting report aggregates the value of the two assets. While the process of aggregation leads inevitably to a loss of information, what information is lo...