This paper examines the effect of managerial legal liability coverage on earnings conservatism. Using directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance coverage and cash for indemnification as a proxy for managerial legal liability coverage, we find that the higher the managerial liability coverage, which reduces the expected legal liability of managers, the less conservative the firm's earnings. We also find that managerial legal liability coverage has a stronger influence on earnings conservatism in a legal regime with higher litigation risk. Our results are consistent with the threat of litigation conditioning managers to practice conservative accounting.

The economic theory of auditor independence (DeAngelo 1981b) suggests that auditors' incentives to compromise their independence are related to client importance. Using ratios of client fees and of nonaudit fees divided by the audit firm's U.S. revenues or a surrogate for the audit-practice-office revenues as measures of client importance, we investigate their association with Jones-model abnormal accruals. In a sample of 1,871 clients of Big 5 audit firms we do not find a statistically significant association between abnormal accruals and any of the client importance measures. Our theory development also suggests that auditor incentives to compromise independence should increase with the extent of client opportunities and incentives to manage earnings, and decrease with the strength of corporate governance and auditor expertise. We also do not find a statistically significant association between abnormal accruals and client importance in subsets of the samples partitioned by proxies for these factors.