Business Commons^™

The Pricing Of Conservative Accounting And The Measurement Of Conservatism At The Firm-Year Level, Dan Segal, Jeffrey L. Callen, Ole-Kristian Hope

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This paper analyzes the relation between equity prices and conditional conservatism and introduces a new measure of conservatism at the firm-year level. We show that the asymmetric properties of conservative accounting, the existence of non-accounting sources of information, and the properties of GAAP related to special items combine to generate a nonlinear relation between unexpected equity returns and earnings news (the shock to expected current and future earnings). Based on this model, we construct a conservatism ratio (CR) defined as the ratio of the current earnings shock to earnings news. CR measures the proportion of the total shock to expected …