The Impact of Ownership Structure on Conditional and Unconditional Conservatism

Conservatism in accounting is a concept that has a long history and is one of the most important restrictive concepts and qualitative and certainly important accounting information. Conservatism is an important covenant in financial reporting and shows a level of caution in identifying and measuring profits and assets. The composition of the shareholding or ownership structure is one of the key issues of corporate governance that can have a significant impact on the performance of any company. Because it affects managers' motivation. The most fundamental part of corporate governance is to ensure that shareholders exercise proper corporate governance. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of ownership structure on conditional and unconditional conservatism. To achieve this goal, eight hypotheses were formulated. To test the hypotheses, a systematic sample elimination method consisting of 186 companies was selected from the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the years 2013 to 2018, and multivariate regression model based on combined data was applied. The results show that state ownership, institutional ownership, concentration ownership and managerial ownership have a positive and significant effect on conditional conservatism and state ownership, institutional ownership, concentration ownership on unconditional conservatism do not have a negative and significant effect. But managerial ownership has a positive and significant effect on unconditional conservatism.