Abstract: Taking China’s A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2012 as research samples, this paper tries to measure the accounting conservatism with the cumulative non-operating accrued profits and explores the influences of accounting conservatism on investment efficiency from the perspective of institutional investors’ heterogeneity. The findings show that the level of accounting conservatism is negatively correlated with overinvestment and positively correlated with underinvestment significantly. On the basis of dividing institutional investors into the transactional institutional investors and the stable institutional investors, a further analysis finds that compared with transactional institutional investors, the stable institutional investors have exacerbated the negative correlation between accounting conservatism and overinvestment. At the same time, the stable institutional investors have also eased the positive correlation between accounting conservatism and underinvestment. This indicates that different types of institutional investors can play a regulatory role in the relationships between accounting conservatism and overinvestment and between accounting conservatism and underinvestment.

Key words: overinvestment; underinvestment; accounting conservatism; transactional institutional investors; stable institutional investors