Incerteza da política econômica e a qualidade das demonstrações contábeis: uma análise sob a perspectiva da comparabilidade contábil

Abstract

The development of studies concerning economic and political environment impacts on the corporate environment has been increasing over the last decade. In this sense, the Brazilian scenario stands out, which has an unstable history with oscillations between recession and economic expansion; uncertainty peaks; in addition to political crises (Davis, 2016; Pires, 2016; Barbosa Filho, 2017; Barboza & Zilberman, 2018). As companies operate in a dynamic condition, shaped by political and economic decisions (B. B. Francis et al., 2014; Demir & Ersan, 2017; Gulen & Ion, 2015), the level of uncertainty reflects on the manager's decisions and affects the behavior of users of accounting information. From this perspective, the present study proposes to analyze whether there is a significant relationship between economic policy uncertainty and the comparability of financial statements and the possible effects of this relationship. It should be noted that comparability is a qualitative characteristic of accounting information, intrinsically associated with the quality and usefulness of accounting information (FASB, 2010; IASB, 2018; Nagar et al., 2019; Andrei et al., 2021; Dhole et al., 2021; Ghoul et al., 2021). The accounting similarity model by De Franco et al. (2011) has been applied to obtain a measure of comparability. Five econometric models were estimated to observe the association between comparability and economic policy uncertainty, on each model has been used a different proxy for uncertainty - the main one using the BBD index (Baker et al., 2016). The period analyzed is from 2012 to 2021, and the sample is formed of companies listed on the B3 and classified in accordance with the NAICS. The analyzes allow us to conclude that in the Brazilian scenario there is a strong negative relationship between the uncertainty of economic policy and the comparability of financial statements, indicating that the economic situation and political decisions influence the behavior of the manager in order to have a negative impact on the level of comparability, usefulness and quality of the information disclosed to the user.