This study addresses conservatism in financial reporting. Firms seek financing for an investment. Investors have access to an imperfect accounting signal that may also have a conservative tendency. If the firms have no private information, conservatism is desirable only for negative ex ante expected value investments, consistent with the spirit of the results of Gigler et al (2009) and other st...

We examine a firm’s P/E ratio in the context of a model wherein firms make sequential investments in production capacity. In addition to investment growth, our analysis seeks to identify pricing power in the firm’s product markets and accounting conservatism as determinants of the P/E ratio. A benchmark result demonstrates that, given unbiased accounting, the firm’s P/E ratio can be expressed a...