The main objective of this study was to present empirical evidence on the relation between accounting conservatism and conflicts about dividend policies between majority and minority shareholders of Brazilian publicly traded companies listed on BOVESPA. Data for the period from 1995 to 2006 was retrieved from Economatica. To test the hypotheses, panel data regression was used with two proxies for accounting conservatism - the accrual-based measure used by Givoly and Hayn (2000) and the book-to-market-based measure proposed by Beaver and Ryan (2000). The results corroborate the findings by Ahmed et al. (2002), indicating a relation between accounting conservatism and conflicts about dividend policies between shareholders in the sample companies. The same cannot be affirmed, however, when the proxy based on book-to-market is employed.
Conservatism; Conflicts; Dividend Politics
