I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the ex ante unconditional expected terminal value is less than the second investment (staged investment) ...

Objective: The excessive self-esteem of managers leads to postponing bad news due to weaknesses in performance, and conservatism can be a factor in modifying it. In this paper, the purpose is to examine the role of accounting conservatism in limiting the functional outcomes results from overconfidence managers. Methods: The data of the companies listed in the Tehran Stock Exchange for the peri...

This paper analyzes how accounting biases endogenously arise as firm owners’ optimal response to balance different stewardship uses of accounting information systems. Specifically, we identify conditions under which the nature of the stewardship use affects whether the accounting system exhibits conservative or liberal bias. We distinguish two types of stewardship uses of accounting information...

This paper studies the role of conservative accounting standards in alleviating rational yet dysfunctional unobservable earnings manipulation. We show that when accounting numbers serve both the valuation role (in which potential investors use accounting reports to assess a firm’s expected future payoff) and the stewardship role (in which current shareholders rely on the same reports to monitor...

We examine the impact of accounting conservatism on corporate innovation. We find that firms with a higher level of accounting conservatism generate fewer patents and patent citations. They invest less in R&D activities but our results hold after controlling for this lower R&D activity. Moreover, the cash-flows associated with innovation in firms with more conservative accounting are lower and ...

We develop a model to analyze how corporate governance and managerial optimism affect firms’financial reporting choices, and managers’incentives to manipulate accounting reports. Conservative accounting is advantageous because it enables boards to act on bad news and block investment ideas that are unattractive to shareholders but attractive to management. This feature of conservatism, however,...