Reliability and efficacy of accruals and cash flows which are among the most important factors affecting dividend deviation have always been in question and subject to anomalies. The presence of these anomalies in accruals and cash flows and its effect on future returns and the consequences that they can have in country’s investments are the main motives to choose this issue for the current stu...

W document considerable return comovement associated with accruals after controlling for other common factors. An accrual-based factor-mimicking portfolio has a Sharpe ratio of 0.16, higher than that of the market factor or the SMB and HML factors of Fama and French. According to rational frictionless asset pricing models, the ability of accruals to predict returns should come from the loadings...

Prior research has documented a ‘‘kink’’ in the earnings distribution: too few firms report small losses, too many firms report small profits. We investigate whether boosting of discretionary accruals to report a small profit is a reasonable explanation for this ‘‘kink.’’ Overall, we are unable to confirm that boosting of discretionary accruals is the key driver of the kink. We caution the use ...

This study examined the role of positive and negative discretionary accrual management in the stock price impact. A sample of 66 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange was selected for a ten-year period (2008-2017). Accrual management was found to lead to significant changes in stock prices, and uninformed investors incur trading costs caused by the stock price impact. The results showed two key...

We examine how adjustments to earnings during year-end audits affect measures of earnings quality. There are four key findings. First, audit adjustments cause earnings to become smoother and more persistent. Second, the adjustments result in higher accrual quality. Third, audit adjustments have a larger negative effect on signed accruals than absolute accruals. Fourth, the adjustments do not re...

We propose market timing strategies aiming to exploit the aggregate accruals’ return forecasting power. We examine several performance metrics of the aggregate accruals based market timing strategy such as excess portfolio return, Sharpe ratio, and Jensen’s alpha. We provide robust evidence that, relative to the passive investment strategy of buying and holding the stock market, the market timi...

We test the effect of audit effort on earnings management using a unique database of hours worked by auditors on 9,738 audits in Greece between 1994 and 2002. When audit hours are lower, (1) abnormal accruals are more often positive than negative, (2) positive abnormal accruals are larger, and (3) companies are more likely to manage earnings upwards in order to meet or beat the zero earnings be...

Earnings management is an important part of current accounting studies. Many of those studies concentrate on accruals. This study critically evaluates frequently used accrual models. The Jones model was the first econometric approach to estimating discretionary accruals. Even though it is subject to several limitations, such as model misspecification, omitted-variables, and errors-in-variables ...

In this research, the relationship between accruals quality and bankruptcy of companies has been studied. According to Dechow et al.chr('39')s (1995) model, the quality of accruals was measured, and according to the Shirata model (1998), bankruptcy was examined. Operations were considered as the control variables. The research hypothesis was tested using a multivariate regression model and a co...