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The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of local political uncertainty on the asymmetric cost behavior (i.e. cost stickiness) for listed firms in China.

In this study, the authors manually collect the turnover data of prefecture-city officials as a measure of exogenous fluctuations in political uncertainty and obtain firm-level financial information from the China Stock Market Accounting Research (CSMAR) database. To perform the analysis, the authors augment the traditional cost stickiness model by including the interaction terms of the prefecture-city official turnover, and firm-level and prefecture-city level control variables.

The authors find that political turnover leads to a higher degree of cost stickiness, implying that firms retain slack resources when political uncertainty is high. Moreover, the effect of political turnover on cost stickiness is more pronounced for firms residing in regions with weaker institutional environments, and firms that are privately owned and with smaller size. The authors further provide evidence that policy uncertainty and the threat of losing political connection are two underlying channels. Overall, this study documents that the local political process is an important channel that influences corporate operational decisions.

This study provides the first piece of evidence on the relation between political uncertainty and cost stickiness at the local government level. Moreover, the authors propose and demonstrate two underlying channels through which political uncertainty affects firms' asymmetric cost behavior.

The present study seeks to shed further light on the effectiveness of Basu (1997) and Khan and Watts' (2009) differential timeliness metrics in detecting predictable differences in conservatism following corrections of restated earnings.

Using cross-sectional and time-series analyses for companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2009–2013, the results indicate lower conservatism for restating firms as compared to their counterparts during prerestatement period.

Using cross-sectional and time-series analyses for companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange during 2009–2013, the results indicate lower conservatism for restating firms as compared to their counterparts during prerestatement period. In contrast, our findings are indicative of higher conservatism among these restating firms during the years of restatements. Moreover, the time-series approach captures a higher conservatism for the restating firms during restatement years than prerestatement periods. Overall, these results provide insight into the usefulness of the metrics used in the restatement setting.

Similar to recent papers, the present study seeks to shed further light on the ability of Basu-based coupled with Khan–Watts-based measures of conservatism to detect situations in which companies' earnings are known to be significantly restated.