Earnings Management, Conservatism, and Earnings Quality

This monograph reviews economic models that study earnings management and conservatism in an information economics framework. Both introduce a deliberate or a mandatory bias in financial reports. The fundamental issue this monograph addresses is what economic effects these biases have on earnings quality. We focus on models of managers in firms interacting with rational capital market participants, and briefly consider some contracting models. The models allow us to analyze earnings management and rational inferences by market participants in equilibrium in a variety of settings and to pinpoint costs and benefits of earnings management. We discuss how investors can elicit the maximum information from the biased reports and what potential remedies actually achieve in equilibrium. For example, accounting standards that reduce discretion for earnings management may be detrimental from a welfare point of view. In rational expectations models earnings quality can be defined as the information content in reported earnings. We discuss the earnings response coefficient, value relevance, and accounting-based earnings quality measures and how they reflect changes in earnings quality. Further, we review analytical work on conservatism of accounting standards and why conservatism can be welfare-enhancing even though it introduces a bias in the earnings reports. It is exactly through this bias that the benefit arises. Therefore, a differentiated view of earnings management and conservatism is warranted; neither is principally desirable or undesirable, but this depends on the circumstances. The benefit of equilibrium models is that they offer a rigorous explanation for the phenomena and show that sometimes conventional wisdom does not apply. There exist subtle interactions between accounting standards, the institutional environment, and earnings management that lead to several insights that challenge conventional wisdom. The models describe the economics behind these results and the particular circumstances.