The asymmetric timeliness (AT) coefficient as a measure of accounting conservatism has been subject to much debate. We clarify the conditions under which the AT coefficient identifies accounting conservatism in the presence of skewness. Specifically, using an extensive simulation-based approach, we examine the joint impact of return skewness, earnings skewness, and return endogeneity. We show that skewness of returns and earnings distorts the AT coefficient as a measure of conservatism when returns are endogenous. While earnings skewness is a predicted consequence of conditional conservatism, return skewness is arguably unrelated to conservative reporting and cannot be tackled by simple skew reducing transformations or outlier-robust estimators. Empirically, we analyze AT and skewness of firms sorted on size and MTB, highlighting the importance of constant skewness across groups for accurate comparisons of accounting conservatism.

作为衡量会计稳健性的指标，非对称及时性（AT）系数一直备受争议。我们阐明了 AT 系数在存在偏度的情况下识别会计稳健性的条件。具体来说，我们使用广泛的基于模拟的方法，研究了回报偏度、收益偏度和回报内生性的联合影响。我们表明，当回报是内生的时，回报和收益的偏度扭曲了作为保守主义衡量标准的 AT 系数。虽然收益偏度是有条件保守主义的预期结果，但回报偏度可以说与保守的报告无关，并且不能通过简单的偏度减少变换或异常稳健估计器来解决。根据经验，我们分析了按规模和 MTB 排序的公司的 AT 和偏度，