Conservadorismo contábil e o custo do crédito bancário no Brasil / Accounting conservatism and the cost of bank credit in Brazil

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

This study investigates the relationship between accounting conservatism and the bank credit market in Brazil. Conservatism is considered one of the most traditional and important practices in accounting. The theoretical and empirical literature argues that conditional conservatism, characterized by asymmetric and timely recognition of economic losses in accounting numbers, increases the efficiency of debt contracts, because it permits creditors to identify increased risks of borrowers on a timely basis and take measures to protect their capital. Conservatism also restricts opportunistic behavior by managers and owners in relation to the companys earnings, thus protecting creditors interests. Due to the benefits provided by conditional conservatism, creditors can create economic incentives for firms to adopt conservative practices, by reducing interest rates on loans. This study empirically examines whether the adoption of conservative accounting practices leads to a reduction in the cost of bank credit of Brazilian companies. The sample analyzed is composed of data on 1,300 firms and approximately 813 thousand debt contracts, in the period from 2000 to 2009. The examinations are based on specification of econometric models that associate the cost of bank credit to the degree of conservatism and a set of control variables, which include characteristics of the firms, credit transactions and lending banks, besides time dummy variables to capture macroeconomic factors. The models parameters were estimated by the system generalized method of moments (GMM), seeking to control for the problem of endogeneity of the regressors. The cost of bank credit was calculated in two ways, one considering all loan agreements of the borrower firm and the other only considering the loans obtained from banks free resources. To measure conservatism, we used five metrics that capture the phenomenon from different perspectives. We did not find evidence of a statistically significant relationship between the conservatism measures and interest rates on the loans contracted by the firms in the sample. These results are robust to variations in model specifications, parameter estimation method and operational definition of the variables. The evidence indicates that the adoption of conservative accounting practices does not lead to a lower cost of bank credit of Brazilian firms. The Brazilian institutional setting is marked by weak legal protection of creditors and low demand for financial statements with high informational quality. This situation does not produce incentives for lenders to stimulate the adoption of conservative accounting practices by firms, by means of reducing interest rates. Since firms to not receive economic benefits associated with reporting conservative economic numbers, the use of such practices is restricted in Brazil. Therefore, the results for the Brazilian market do not corroborate the theoretical predictions.

ASSUNTO(S)

bank credit - brazil contabilidade financeira crédito bancário - brasil financial accounting

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