Conditional Conservatism: An Analysis of Nonlinearity and Lead-Lag Relations

Recent studies have provided evidence that the association between earnings and contemporaneous returns is stronger when returns are negative, reflecting accounting conservatism. In this paper, we investigate two important aspects in this asymmetric timeliness of earnings: (1) whether the contemporaneous earnings-return relation is concave and (2) whether earnings show asymmetric timeliness with respect to lagged returns. We show that the relation between earnings and stock returns is more positive for extreme bad news, implying a concave relationship between earnings and returns. We also find asymmetric timeliness with respect to lagged returns. Moreover, we find similar results using earnings line items such as special items and discontinued items. Overall, our evidence suggests that the Basu-type regression without considering these two aspects biases the extent of conditional conservatism.