Whilst extensive research has been done on the association between corporate governance and firm performance, the empirical evidence is inconclusive. This thesis argues that the failure of past studies to establish a positive association between corporate governance and performance might be caused by the use of conservative accounting in firms. If firms with stronger corporate governance adopt more conservative accounting procedures, then tests of the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and performance will be biased downwards. If market participants fail to recognise a link between conservative accounting and corporate governance, then firms with stronger corporate governance might also be systematically undervalued. Therefore, studying the relationship between selected corporate governance attributes and the extent of conservative accounting does more than just extend our understanding of the link between governance characteristics and accounting quality. It also provides useful insights for interpreting the existing literature on the association between corporate governance and performance. In this thesis, detailed investigation is undertaken of the link between several governance characteristics (as well as an aggregate index) and the extent of conservatism evident in Australian firms?? financial reporting. Overall, the results provide only weak evidence that firms with certain governance characteristics report more conservatively. Evidence of any such link is restricted to measures of board composition and leadership, and even then the results are sensitive to the method used to measure the extent of conservatism in financial reporting. There is no systematic evidence of an association for measures of audit committee composition, nor board size. Finally, there is only weak evidence that use of a Big 5 auditor affects the extent of conservatism and the results are sensitive to the period investigated. These results are all robust to explicitly recognizing possible endogeneity between the extent of conservative accounting and the governance attributes examined. Overall, the results raise important questions about the extent to which widely advocated corporate governance attributes result in accounting outcomes which accelerate the revelation of relatively poor economic news, at least for Australian firms in the years examined (1998 and 2002). However, beyond the immediate relationship examined, the results also suggest that caution is appropriate before dismissing the absence of a link between governance attributes and firm performance as being attributable to accounting conservatism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/234927 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Roslinda, Accounting, Australian School of Business, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Accounting |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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