The concept of conservatism is consistent with economic theory and accounting practice and has led to a large body of accounting literature. Conservatism consists of income recognition policies that result in recognizing bad news (economic losses) than recognizing good news (economic gains). The most widely used measure of conservatism. DT coefficient. The usefulness of Basu’s measure has been questioned by some recent papers. Ball et note that a large number of studies report Basu estimates of DT conservatism that behave as predicted by credible theories, and the authors conclude that ‘‘the importance of this literature, together with the advice that its results be discarded, make this issue worthy of further study’’.