Prior accounting research argues that diminishing marginal returns on new investments drive lower persistence of accruals relative to cash flows. Macroeconomic research documents that marginal profitability is counter-cyclical, which implies that diminishing marginal returns on new investments are more pronounced during periods of expansions than recessions. Linking the cyclicality of diminishi...

In this study, I investigate whether market learning explains the absence of the accrual anomaly in recent years by examining three conditions associated with the presence of the anomaly in prior research: (i) a differential relation between future earnings and cash flows versus accruals, (ii) incorrect weighting of cash flows and accruals by investors when predicting earnings, and (iii) associ...

This paper examines the link between the amount of estimation needed during the accrual generating process and the persistence of the accruals portion of earnings. We measure the amount of estimation needed during the accrual generating process using the number of estimation-related linguistic cues in the notes to the financial statements and the critical accounting policies section of the mana...

Prior research has estimated piece-meal the determinants of audit fees, non-audit fees and abnormal accruals. Intuition, informal analysis, and a variety of theories suggest that audit fees, non-audit fees, and abnormal accruals are jointly determined. We address this endogeneity issue by modeling the confluence of audit fees, fees for non-audit services and abnormal accruals in a system of sim...

Motivated by the findings that the aggregate (discretionary) accruals positively predicts oneyear-ahead firm-level stock returns and that there is a considerable amount of co-movement in firm-level (discretionary) accruals, we decompose firm-level (discretionary) accruals into a market-wide component and a firm-specific component. We document robust evidence that the two orthogonal (discretiona...

This study examines whether firms just above and just below three earnings benchmarks (loss avoidance, earnings changes, and analyst forecast) have differing levels of discretionary accruals. If discretionary accruals are a measure of earnings management, then firms above (benchmark beaters) and firms below a benchmark should have differing levels of discretionary accruals. Dechow et al. (2003)...

We examine how the criteria for choosing estimation samples (peer firms) affect the ability to detect discretionary accruals, using several variants of the Jones (1991) model. Researchers commonly estimate accruals models in cross-section, and define the estimation sample as all firms in the same industry. We examine whether firm size performs at least as well as industry membership as the crit...

This study documents a subtle and counter-intuitive interaction between operating cash flow (CFO) and accruals, and their association with future stock returns. While the two strategies should by construction capture similar anomalies, we find evidence in two large stock markets that they appear distinct, and that returns to these strategies are strongly negatively correlated. We show that the ...

This study examines the role of pre-IPO discretionary accruals in the valuation and underpricing of IPOs. We find that IPO offer price is unaffected whereas market closing price is positively associated with the levels of pre-IPO discretionary accruals for issuers with aggressively reported earnings. We also find that this relative over-valuation of managed earnings by the markets explains a po...

This paper evaluates a comprehensive list of metrics proposed for detecting earnings management in a setting where managers manipulate earnings to round up reported EPS. I find that deferred tax expense is able to detect earnings management in the rounding-up setting while discretionary accruals models are not. Further analysis provides evidence that firms manipulate bad debt expense for the pu...