Discussion of “Asymmetric timeliness of earnings, market-to-book and conservatism in financial reporting”

Roychowdhury and Watts [2007. Asymmetric timeliness of earnings, market-to-book and conservatism in financial reporting. Journal of Accounting and Economics.] provide a thought-provoking discussion of an important topic and consider a controversial role of accounting inconsistent with the valuation perspective of accounting currently adopted by standard setters. The paper uses a contracts-based view of accounting to explain the empirical relation between two measures of conservatism, the market-to-book ratio and asymmetric timeliness. Although the predictions from their framework are consistent with the previously documented negative correlation between these measures, suggesting this criticism of asymmetric timeliness may be misguided, I will be surprised if their paper eliminates the controversy over these measures of conservatism.