A Reexamination of the Persistence of Accruals and Cash Flows
重新检验了应计项目持续性低于现金流的结论，发现传统度量方法因包含非当期交易而产生偏差，修正后两者持续性差异缩小超70%，且超85%的公司无证据支持应计项目持续性更低。
We reexamine prior studies' conclusion that accruals are less persistent than cash, focusing on two aspects of persistence that are crucial to determining its properties. The first (time specificity) refers to the fact that persistence describes how current-period shocks to income translate into next-period income. Traditional measures of accruals are, however, functions of current- and non-current-period transactions. We show that the inclusion of non-current-period transactions leads to a downward (upward) bias on the persistence of accruals (cash flows). We develop alternative measures of accruals and cash flows that are not misaligned and show that the differential persistence of cash flows over accruals is more than 70% smaller using these measures. The second aspect of persistence is firm-specificity. Specifically, we evaluate persistence using firm-specific estimations and find that more than 85% of firms show no evidence that accruals are less persistent than cash flows.