Effects of financial characteristics on accounting conservatism of listed companies in Vietnam stock exchange

The research objectives is to analyze factors impacting on accounting conservatism such as growth opportunity, return on equity, sales growth, return on assets, capital intensity, investment opportunity, financial distress, financial leverage, global diversification and uncertainty environment. In this study, accounting conservatism is equal to non-operating accruals. The authors used balanced data collected from 379 listed companies in Vietnam stock market in a 5-year period from 2017 to 2021. The authors compared 3 models including Pooled OLS, FEM and REM to choose the most appropriate one. The test results show that FEM is the most appropriate, but this model has the phenomenon of heteroscedasticity, so the authors used FGLS to test the hypotheses. The research results show that among the independent variables included in the model, there are five variables impacting on the accounting conservatism with statistical significance of 5%. The independent variable which is investment opportunity set has a positive impact on the accounting conservatism. In contrast, the independent variables including growth opportunities, return on assets, financial leverage, and uncertainty environment have a negative impact on the accounting conservatism. Besides, the other five variables of return on equity, sales growth, capital intensity, financial distress, global diversification have no impact on the accounting conservatism in terms of statistical significance.