We examine the relation between earnings management to meet or barely beat analyst forecasts and the cross-sectional variation in contemporaneous and past accounting conservatism. Investigating the link between earnings management and accounting conservatism is important because doing so provides evidence concerning conservatism’s ability to constrain managers’opportunistic behavior. We first estimate a modified version of the Basu (1997) model and find a negative relation between contemporaneous conditional conservatism and earnings management to avoid a negative earnings surprise. In contrast, we find a positive relation between past unconditional conservatism and earnings management to avoid a negative earnings surprise. Taken together, our results suggest that unconditional conservative accounting generates slack that, in the presence of bad news, allows managers to avoid writing down net asset values and thus increases firms’ likelihood of meeting or beating analyst forecasts.

我們檢視盈余管理和會計穩(wěn)健性的關(guān)系,盈余管理幾乎推翻了分析人士的預(yù)測和同時期的橫向變化。調(diào)查它們之間的聯(lián)系,發(fā)現(xiàn)對盈余管理與會計穩(wěn)健性的研究很重要的,因為這樣做，能提供證據(jù)，證明關(guān)于穩(wěn)健性對經(jīng)理人機會主義行為的約束。我們首先估計修改版的巴蘇（1997）模型，找一個即時的條件穩(wěn)健與盈余管理避免負收益消息的負面關(guān)系。與此相反，我們發(fā)現(xiàn)一個積極的關(guān)系，過去無條件的穩(wěn)健與盈余管理避免負收益驚喜。兩者合計，我們的結(jié)果表明，無條件的穩(wěn)健性會計會產(chǎn)生松弛，使管理人員在存在的壞消息時，避免寫下來凈資產(chǎn)價值減值的可能，從而增加企業(yè)的預(yù)期效益，達到或超過分析師預(yù)測。