BOARD ATTRIBUTES AND ACCOUNTING CONSERVATISM

Abstract

The study examined board attributes and accounting conservatism with evidence from listed industrial goods firms in Nigeria. The objective of the study was to investigate whether board gender diversity, board independence and board diligence have significant effect on accounting conservatism of listed industrial goods firms in Nigeria. The secondary source of data collection was adopted in the study where the purposive sampling technique was used to select a sample size of eight (8) industrial goods firms in Nigeria for the study. Least Square regression analysis was used in this study and the findings revealed that board gender diversity, board independence and board diligence have no significant effect on accounting conservatism of listed industrial goods firms in Nigeria. The study concluded that conservatism had been a salient characteristic of accounting information and recent research into this area has documented a significant increase in conservatism in the last few decades. Finally, it was recommended that in order to promote accounting conservatism, deliberate efforts should be made to maintain the independence of the board by increasing the number of non-executive directors on the board.