The objective of this paper is to identify the existence of significant differences between Brazilian publicly-quoted and private companies as far as concerns the conservative nature of their financial statements. The exploratory and descriptive research was based on a sample of 1,384 company years, with 770 observations relating to private companies and 614 to publicly-quoted companies, for the period 2000 to 2004. The Ball and Shivakumar (2005) model was used, which allows conservatism to be analyzed by means of the reversion of accounting results. The results obtained are evidence that in private companies there is less likelihood of recognizing losses opportunely and because of this their financial statements are less conservative than those of publicly-quoted companies.
Conservatism; asymmetric recognition of the results; quality of the accounting information; public-quoted and private companies; accounting measurement
