Research on the Influence of Managerial Characteristics on Accounting Conservatism in Public Coal Companies during the period of COVID-19

Abstract

Objectives For a long time, scholars have been concerned about the impact of manager and team characteristics on corporate performance or corporate value, and the spread of COVID-19 forces us to consider the impact of manager characteristics on accounting conservatism. Methods This paper selects the financial data of 34 public coal companies from 2015 to 2019 as the research sample, establishes the measurement model of accounting conservatism based on Basu model to evaluate the accounting conservatism of public coal companies, and uses three regression models to study the impact of managers' age, education level and tenure on the accounting conservatism of companies. Results The results show that accounting conservatism is common in public coal companies, and the average value of C-score is greater than 0 for five consecutive years. Conclusions Furthermore, the empirical results show that the regression coefficients of age and tenure of managers are 0.0224 and 0.0035, respectively, which indicates that the age and tenure of managers have a positive impact on accounting conservatism. However, the level of education has no significant impact on the accounting conservatism of public coal companies, which depends on the particularity of production and management of public coal companies, and cannot completely deny the impact of education level on the conservatism.