Financial reporting incentives for conservative accounting: The influence of legal and political institutions

This paper explores financial reporting incentives created by an economy's institutional structure. The underlying premise of our analysis is that a country's legal/judicial system, securities laws, and political economy create incentives that influence the behavior of corporate executives, investors, regulators and other market participants. Further, such incentives ultimately shape the properties of reported accounting numbers. We empirically analyze relations between key characteristics of country-level institutions and the asymmetric recognition of economic gains and losses into earnings (i.e., conditional conservatism). We also provide evidence on channels through which specific institutions manifest their influence on observed conservatism. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.