Accruals and managerial operating decisions over the firm life cycle

This paper explores how accruals capture managerial operating decisions that evolve over a firm's life cycle. I argue that growing firms face different operating environments and have fundamentally different accruals properties than those of mature and declining firms. I provide evidence that accruals vary with changes in a firm's operating environment over its life cycle. I show in one example that by ignoring life cycle fundamentals, previous empirical methods would likely misclassify this variation in accruals as reflecting systematic differences in a firm's "accounting quality". I suggest empirical techniques to mitigate incorrect inferences about accounting quality and to better understand how operating decisions affect accruals.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Michelle M

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• S.P. Kothari.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37251

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37251