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...

This paper examines whether the firm-level accrual and cash flow effects extend to the aggregate stock market. In sharp contrast to previous firm-level findings, aggregate accruals is a strong positive time series predictor of aggregate stock returns, and cash flows is a negative predictor. In addition, innovations in accruals are negatively contemporaneously correlated with aggregate returns, ...

While prior research, as noted in our paper, often uses various accrual prediction models to detect earnings management, not much is known about the accuracy, both relative and absolute, associated with these models. Our paper investigates the accuracy of six different accrual prediction models, and offers the following findings. Only the Kang-Sivaramakrishnan (1995) model performs moderately w...

Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This paper fills this gap by examining how current accruals affect future earnings (the accrual effect) an...

We find that accruals mispricing is more pronounced for stocks with higher level of probability of informed trading (PIN). We interpret it as the evidence of informed traders using their proprietary information on accruals quality to trade against average investors. The informed traders’ arbitrage generates an annualized size and book-to-market adjusted abnormal return of 19.81% over the 1993-2...

This paper investigates the difference between two widely used measures of accruals and their differential impact on accrual strategy returns. The two measures are accruals computed using consecutive changes in the balance sheet items and accruals computed as earnings minus cash flows from operating activities, both from the cash flow statement. Our investigations reveal that the difference bet...

We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analystsbased unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as ‘‘pseudo’’ targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and ...