Accounting conservatism quality of accounting information and crash risk of stock prices

Abstract

From an information perspective, sources of risk should be reflected in accounting fundamentals. However, asymmetry in disclosure generated from a decrease in information flow to users of financial statements may lead to a stock price crash when the news is eventually disclosed. The present study examines the impact of a number of accounting and auditing attributes that have been found to improve reporting efficiency on the prediction of stock price crash risk. The results indicate a negative relation between conditional conservatism and future stock price crash risk, which supports evidence in the existing literature but more importantly provide new evidence by showing that unconditional conservatism is also negatively related to future stock price crash risk. In addition some evidence shows that the level of unconditional conservatism affects the relation between conditional conservatism and future stock price crash risk. On the other hand, auditing attributes do not seem to have predictive ability for stock price crash risk while in consistency with the literature the relation between lagged earnings opacity and stock price crash risk is positive. Taken together, the results imply that researchers should disentangle the effects of the two forms of conservatism when assessing the likelihood of a future stock price crash and that the beneficial role of conservatism in reducing stock-crash risk should be not overlooked.