This study investigates the macroeconomic consequences of firm-level accounting conservatism. Consistent with conditional conservatism extending to the aggregate level, I demonstrate that annual estimates of aggregate corporate profits and gross domestic product from 1929 to 2007 compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis are more sensitive to negative aggregate cash flow news than to positive aggregate cash flow news. Next, I estimate the dollar value impact of firm-level accounting conservatism on measurements of macroeconomic fundamentals. Finally, I show that the federal funds rate set by the U.S. Federal Reserve tends to be lower when the dollar value impact of firm-level accounting conservatism on gross domestic product measurements is larger. These results suggest that accounting can impact social welfare by altering the measurement attributes of key macroeconomic indicators and shaping monetary policy decisions which regulate the money supply and alter macroeconomic growth. / text

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This thesis contributes to the literature in the finance and accounting field throughout its three empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter contributes to the literature on accounting conservatism in several ways; first, it investigates the accounting conservatism of US insurance companies using four measures, namely, non-operating accruals, skewness of earnings and cash flows, book to market ratio and asymmetric timeliness measures. Second, this paper compares these four measures in order to determine the association and differences between them. Finally, the level of accounting conservatism of the insurance companies is compared to that of a sample of commercial banks to check whether they have similar levels of accounting conservatism. The results of the first chapter suggest that the changes in accounting performance, as measured by return over assets, can be partly explained by accounting conservatism, since it is measured by the accumulation of non-operating accruals, skewness of operating cash flow and accruals, book to market ratio, adjusted book to market ratio and Basu's asymmetric measure. All of these four measures give robust evidence that insurance companies' accounts tended to be conservative for the whole sample period, and that the level of conservatism has risen over the years. More interestingly, a t test for the differences in means suggests that accruals conservatism show on average a higher level of accounting conservatism than book value conservatism does. Finally, our results, based on a constant sample consist of 92 banks and 46 insurance companies whose data are available for all the sample years; they suggest that both insurance companies and banks have similar levels of accounting conservatism due to their similar reporting characteristics. The second empirical chapter contributes to the existing literature on equity valuation in two ways. First, it confirms the importance of imposing linear information dynamics when predicting the equity values of insurance companies, because the restricted models result in fewer error metrics. Second, it highlights the role of the accruals components in the equity valuation of US insurance companies by demonstrating that the incorporation of accrual components in the residuals income valuation model suggested by Ohlson (1995) has smaller error metrics than those of aggregate net income. Our results are based on a sample of US insurance companies, which consists of 718 firm-year observations over the period from 2001 to 2012. For instance, our results suggest that total accruals, changes in insurance reserve, changes in account receivables, and deferred acquisition costs have an incremental ability to predict equity market value over abnormal earnings and book values. Furthermore, the predictive ability of changes in insurance reserves is higher than the predictive ability of changes in account receivables and the change in deferred acquisition costs without imposing the LIM structures. However, when the LIM structure is imposed the predictive ability of changes in deferred acquisition costs is higher than the predictive ability of both changes in accounts receivable and changes in insurance reserves. Our final empirical chapter contributes to the literature on accounting anomalies by investigating the value to price anomaly (V/P), where the fundamental value (V) is estimated using the residual income valuation model. Motivated by the findings of Hwang and Lee (2013), Fama and French (2015), and Fama and French (2016), Chapter Four asks whether V/P strategies reflect the risks factor or whether this is better explained by market inefficiency, and whether Fama and French's five-factor model can explain the excess return of V/P. To answer the previous questions we use data from the merger of COMPUSTAT, CRSP, I/B/E/S for all the non-financial firms listed in AMEX, NYSE, and NASDAQ during the period from 1987 to 2015. Our findings suggest that the V/P ratio is positively correlated to future stock returns after controlling for several firm characteristics, which are known to be proxies of common risks. Our results indicate that the omission of risk factors is not likely to be an explanation of the V/P effect. To answer the second question, we compare the performances of different asset pricing models by calculating the GRS F-statistics. Our findings clearly indicate that the five-factor model of Fama and French performs better than either the CAPM or the traditional Fama and French three factor model. These results confirm that the excess returns of V/P strategy vary due to the differences in size, the B/M ratio, operating profit and betas across quintile portfolios. However, these factors cannot explain all the variation in excess returns; moreover, the stocks in the high V/P may be riskier than the stocks in the low V/P portfolios in certain other dimensions.

本研究之目的在於探討公司治理機制對盈餘保守性之影響。在經營權及所有權分離的情況下，代理問題因此而生，公司適當的採用保守原則可以緩和代理成本的問題。同樣的，公司治理機制之強弱與治理風險的高低也與代理成本息息相關，因此，本研究藉由檢視盈餘對訊息反映之不對稱性與公司治理機制間之關係，以探討治理機制是否會影響公司盈餘之保守性，本研究亦探討近年來我國整體外在訴訟環境之轉變，對於公司盈餘保守性之影響。 本研究結果顯示，我國公司盈餘之保守性隨著外部法律環境漸趨嚴格，而日益增高。在先天治理風險較高的情況下，例如：董監質押比率、大股東持股比率愈高，公司盈餘之保守程度愈高。另一方面，董事及經理人整體權益誘因較高的情況下，盈餘保守程度較低。在外部治理機制方面，機構投資人持股愈高，盈餘偏向不保守；負債比率較高之公司，其盈餘則偏向保守。在董事會治理機制對盈餘保守性之影響方面，除董事會規模愈大，盈餘愈趨保守外，監察人規模及獨立董監對盈餘保守性之影響並不顯著。 整體而言，我國公司運用保守原則來緩和代理問題的情況確實存在。但我國公司治理機制對盈餘保守性之影響，可能主要來自於先天治理風險之差異，後天治理機制之影響效果則尚不顯著。 / Past research shows that accounting conservatism produces earnings that reflect bad news faster than good news. This study investigates the role of accounting conservatism in corporate governance. More specifically, we use several variables, including board and ownership structures, outside shareholders and independent director and supervisor, to assess a company’s characteristics in corporate governance. Our results show that the sensitivity of earnings to bad news is significantly higher (lower) for strong (weak) governance risk firms and the asymmetric timeliness of earnings is significantly higher for the sample firms in recent year. More specifically, we find that (i) the number of board directors, the percentage of outside directors’ shareholdings and the pledge rate of directors’ shareholdings are positively related to conservatism, and (ii) the percentage of institutional ownership is negatively related to conservatism. There is no evidence to support that a company’s independent directors and supervisors can improve the conservatism in its earnings. Our results hold after controlling for firm size, growth opportunities, industry, and audit quality. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion in Watts (2003) that accounting conservatism plays a role in corporate governance.