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Accounting standard setters face a perpetual challenge in balancing relevance and reliability when establishing generally accepted accounting principles. This tension is especially heightened when the nature of the economic information concerns intangible assets. This article presents exploratory evidence about standard setters’ response to this challenge by examining whether Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 142 (SFAS 142): Goodwill and Other Intangible Assets altered the information content of goodwill write-offs. To more accurately capture the information of goodwill write-offs, the authors first create a model to estimate expected impairments. The difference between actual write-offs and expected write-offs represents write-off surprises or unexpected goodwill write-offs. The authors document a negative and significant stock market reaction to unexpected goodwill write-offs. On a cross-sectional basis, they find that the market reaction is attenuated for firms with low information asymmetry (their proxy is a high analyst following) and for firms that find it relatively costly to implement impairment tests (their proxy is the inverse of firm size). The authors find no variation in market reaction based on firm complexity (their proxy is the number of firm segments). The negative reaction for the high information asymmetry and larger firms weakens following the adoption of SFAS 142. The latter result is consistent with SFAS 142 critics’ claims that more relevant accounting information, captured by fair value methods, is difficult to implement reliably and thus can reduce the information content of accounting reports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I investigate the relation between conservatism and book-tax differences (BTDs), where ''conservatism'' refers to conservatism in the financial statement context (as opposed to the taxable income context). Specifically, ''conservatism'' refers to conditional and unconditional conservatism per Basu (1997). The primary objective of my study is to further the use of BTDs in financial statement analysis. I find that, on average, the conditional and unconditional financial statement conservatism of firm-years with large positive BTDs (book income is greater than taxable income) is similar to that of other sample firm-years, while the conditional and unconditional conservatism in taxable income of firmyears with large positive BTDs is greater than that of other sample firm-years. Thus, contrary to teachings in popular accounting textbooks, my main findings suggest that large positive BTDs do not, on average, reveal information about a firm's relative level of financial statement conservatism. I additionally find that, on average, the unconditional financial statement conservatism among firm-years with large negative BTDs (LNBTDs, taxable income is greater than book income) is greater than that of other sample firm-years, and, at the same time, the conditional and unconditional conservatism in taxable income among firm-years with large negative BTDs is less than that of other sample firm-years. Because the increased financial statement conservatism among firm-years with LNBTDs is unconditional in nature, and is not conditional in nature, the increased conservatism among firm-years in this subsample does not translate into higher earnings quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]