We examine the importance of debtholders’ and shareholders’ concern for conservative accounting. We use the concept of conditional conservatism and study a firm’s earnings behavior around important capital structure decisions, i.e. debt and equity issues. We employ a large sample of US debt and equity issues, which allows us to investigate the timing of conservatism. Our results show that firms issuing equity exhibit increasing conservatism in the period preceding the issue, driven by the demand of shareholders in the public markets. This finding is consistent with the notion that managers signal credibility to the market in an attempt to improve issue terms. We obtain weaker results for the role of conservatism in issuing debt, which is inconsistent with the idea that financial reports are primarily meant as a governance mechanism in debt contracting.

我们研究了债权人和股东对保守会计的关注的重要性。我们使用条件保守主义的概念并围绕重要的资本结构决策（即债务和股权问题）研究公司的盈利行为。我们使用了大量美国债务和股权问题样本，这使我们能够调查保守主义的时机。我们的结果表明，在公开市场上股东的需求的推动下，发行股票的公司在发行前的一段时间内表现出越来越多的保守性。这一发现与经理人向市场发出可信度信号以试图改善发行条款的观点一致。我们对保守主义在发行债务中的作用获得了较弱的结果，