Organizational Memory and Bank Accounting Conservatism

This paper is the first to investigate the impact of banks’ organizational memory of past history on the conservatism of accounting policy. Specifically, we investigate two types of bad time history: banks’ undercapitalization and the failures of other banks during financial crises. Using a large sample of U.S. banks over the period 1997-2013, we find that both types of bad times are positively related to timelier recognition of earnings …