The effect of unconditional conservatism on the effectiveness of investment policies through overconfidence in the French context

Abstract

In this paper, we first present a practical analysis of the reciprocal relationship between unconditional accounting conservatism and managerial overconfidence. Second, we examine the accounting conservatism effect on the investment policy effectiveness in the French context. The analysis sample includes non-financial companies listed on SBF 250 market with the period 2009-2017. We determine, through this analysis, whether accounting conservatism mitigates the optimism of over-confident managers, knowing that they generally tend to overestimate future returns on investments, exercise less prudent accounting practices and over-invest in capital projects. Basically, this research aims to verify the type of moderating effect that accounting conservatism provides for investment policy effectiveness, and the reduction of related behavioural bias generated by overconfidence. Empirical results allow elucidating this relationship and removing the ambiguity of the accounting conservatism role on over-investment processes. The conclusions partly opposed to those established in the literature on other analytical samples.