Empirical Research on the Influence of Accounting Conservatism on Debt Financing Efficiency

Accounting conservatism's influence on accounting theory and practice has been both long and significant.As a governance mechanism to reduce the corporate latent costs of litigation,contracting and political,accounting conservatism can coordinate conflicts of interests among corporate internal contracts,guarantee effective implementation of contracts,and significantly reduce moral hazard and opportunistic behavior among corporate internal contracts on the basis of asymmetrical information.Accounting model in China is a mixed model between historical cost model and fair value model now,so empirical accounting study need to consider the reality that fair value and accounting conservatism is moderate combination.But researches only pay attention to whether fair value or accounting conservatism,a few papers study fair value and accounting conservatism together.On the background of international convergence of the new accounting standards,this paper empirically researches the two following aspects. First,using empirical data of listed firms in China from 2001~2009,we applied multivariate regression analysis method to analyze the influence of accounting conservatism on firms' debt financing efficiency.We find that the relationship between accounting conservatism and firms' debt financing efficiency is significantly positive.Applying conservatism accounting policy,firms can easily get loan from debtors,and helpful enhance debt financing efficiency.Reducing the conflict of interest between creditors and shareholders and default risk of debt,accounting conservatism can better protect the interests of creditors.Because of reducing default risk of debt contract and enhancing firms' debt financing efficiency,accounting conservatism is an effective mechanism for debtor. Further,using two different empirical ways,we studied the influence of fair value measurement on the economic consequence of accounting conservatism on debt financing efficiency.After the execution of the new accounting standards since 2007,the re-application of fair value measurement affects creditors' investment behavior from the following two aspects.On one hand,the fair value measurement may have a positive effect on the creditors and help to reveal the company as a result of changes in the fair value of the potential profit or loss,provide more relevant to the decision information,so that the creditors can perceive potential default risk and make more correct judgment.On the other hand,the fair value measurement may have a negative effect on the creditor's rights,and increase the contract supervision cost.We find that the re-application of fair value measurement has no significantly effect on the relationship between accounting conservatism and debt financing efficiency.The result means that the re-application of fair value measurement has no effect on the economic consequence of accounting conservatism on debt financing efficiency. Differing from the existing literature,this paper has three innovations.One is that we choused corporate governance,corporate characteristics and accounting criterion as the influence factors of accounting conservatism,and used the method of principal component analysis to build the comprehensive influence index of China listing firms' accounting conservatism in order to avoid from one or several aspects to discuss the accounting conservatism factors limitations.Two is that we improved Khan and Watts(2009) method to estimate the degree of accounting conservatism of listed firms in China based on Chinese special system background.The accounting conservatism estimation method not only objectively and comprehensively reflect the Chinese special institutional background of various influencing factors,but also eliminates the possible effects of earnings management.Three is that quantitative description of firm debt financing efficiency in this paper is to enrich exist literature.