Restatement likelihood and accounting conservatism : evidence from CFO style

Recent accounting research examines the impact of the individual style of corporate decision-makers on corporate accounting policies. Based on this line of research, we explore how a chief financial officer's (CFO) preference for accounting conservatism affects accounting quality. We provide evidence that CFOs significantly influence accounting conservatism at firm level and find that firms with a conservative CFO are less likely to restate their annual accounts and to receive an SEC comment letter addressing their 10-K filings. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity checks and hold independently of the economic consequences of restatements, firm-level accounting conservatism, the use of different proxies for accounting quality, and CFO conservatism. Also, our results are unaffected by the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX)