Does Accounting Conservatism Discipline Qualitative Disclosure? Evidence From Tone Management in the MD&A*
研究了会计稳健性是否约束管理层在10-K文件的MD&A部分进行向上的语调操纵，发现稳健性越强，向上语调操纵越少，且该效应在管理层操纵动机更强时更显著。
ABSTRACT We investigate whether accounting conservatism, which has been found to be effective in constraining management opportunism in other settings, constrains upward tone management (UTM) in the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the 10‐K filing. We hypothesize that conservatism makes it harder for managers to opportunistically downplay bad news and magnify good news when discussing current performance. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that UTM is negatively associated with several accounting conservatism proxies. Additionally, we hypothesize and find that this association is stronger for firms where managers have higher incentives to manipulate tone. In supplemental analyses, we find evidence to suggest that our results are not due to an endogenous relationship between conservatism and UTM. We also find that conservatism neither encourages downward tone management (DTM) nor constrains managers from conveying real information about future good news. Together, our results suggest that accounting conservatism improves disclosure narratives.