CFO overconfidence and conditional accounting conservatism

Abstract This study investigates the association between Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) overconfidence and conditional accounting conservatism. Relying on upper echelons and overconfidence theories and based on a large sample of US-listed firms’ data from 1992 to 2019 (21,626 firm-year observations), we find a statistically and economically significant negative relationship between CFO overconfidence and conditional accounting conservatism, suggesting that overconfident CFOs tend to diminish conditional accounting conservatism. These findings persist in a series of robustness tests. In the mechanism analysis, we predict that overconfident CFOs aim to convey private information by reducing conditional accounting conservatism. We prove this conjecture by observing that overconfident CFOs who adopt lower levels of conditional accounting conservatism increase earnings informativeness (i.e., the amount of information about future cash flows or earnings contained in current stock returns) and reduce their precautionary incentives to save cash. We further rule out another mechanism (i.e. compensation concerns) that may motivate overconfident CFOs to reduce conditional accounting conservatism. Moreover, we show that overconfident CFOs with higher powers are more able to minimize conditional accounting conservatism. Our study highlights the significance and motivation of overconfident CFOs in determining asymmetric recognition of good and bad news.