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...

We find that the positive relation between aggregate accruals and one-year-ahead market returns documented in Hirshleifer, Hou and Teoh [2009] is driven by discretionary accruals but not normal accruals. The return forecasting power of aggregate discretionary accruals is robust to choices of sample periods, return measurements, estimation methods, business condition and risk premium proxies, an...

This study explores the incremental roles of accruals and net operating cash flows in generating abnormal returns using quarterly and rolling four-quarter data for the entire population of firms, as well as specific industries. Our results show that quarterly net operating cash flow (OCF) is a stronger signal about subsequent quarter’s returns than accruals, and that this result is also true fo...

A fundamental role of accounting information in financial markets is to serve as a basis for capital allocation. An important attribute of the quality of accounting information is the extent to which earnings (accruals) map into cash flows. A poor mapping of accruals into cash flows reduces the information content of reported earnings and results in lower-quality earnings. If investors differ i...

We use MD&A disclosures to predict current-year firm-level accruals using support-vector regressions. We call these predictions MD&A accruals. Our aim is to measure the explanatory power of MD&A disclosures for liquidity and critical accounting choices. We find that MD&A accruals explain a statistically and economically significant portion of firm-level accruals and identify more persistent acc...

Newly public companies tend to exhibit abnormally high accruals in the year of their initial public offering (IPO). Although the prevailing view in the literature is that these accruals are caused by opportunistic misreporting, we show that these accruals do not appear to benefit managers and instead result from the normal economic activity of newly public companies. In particular, and in contr...

Accounting accruals anticipate future economic benefits. They are intended to reverse upon the realization of the anticipated future benefits, such that their reversals have no net impact on future earnings. In practice, however, we show that extreme accruals exhibit a high frequency of subsequent reversals that do impact future earnings. We demonstrate that these reversals explain a number of ...

We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers’ assessments of their firms’ business prospects are imperfect. Since managers’ imperfect business assessments influence both accruals generation and earnings projection, we hypothesize that management earnings forecasts exhi...