NATIONAL ACCOUNTING CULTURE AND EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON THE APPLICATION OF CONSERVATISM

Prudence in accounting is a corner-stone concept which has shaped accounting theory, as well as ordinary financial reporting. Thus, on the quantitative side of the study, we developed a proxy for accounting conservatism, namely the degree of uncertainty associated with the settling of a company's obligations. Accordingly, we hand-collected the relevant accounting data for 388 business groups from 17 European countries. For these companies we computed the provisions-to-liabilities ratio (PLR) and performed several group tests, according to the following original qualitative classification of national accounting cultures. The results indicate that companies incorporated in countries that are classified as 'conservative' do assign a significantly higher degree of uncertainty to their total amount of liabilities.