The Mispricing of Abnormal Accruals
检验市场对异常应计的定价是否理性,发现市场高估了其持续性并导致错误定价,且总应计的错误定价主要源于异常应计。
This paper examines the market pricing of Jones (1991) modelestimated abnormal accruals (often termed “discretionary accruals” in the prior literature) to test whether stock prices rationally reflect the one-year-ahead earnings implications of these accruals. Using the Mishkin (1983) and hedge-portfolio test methods Sloan (1996) employs, I find that the market overestimates the persistence, or one-year-ahead earnings implications, of abnormal accruals, and consequently overprices these accruals. These results extend Subramanyam (1996) by demonstrating that the market not only prices, but also overprices abnormal accruals. They also suggest that the overpricing of total accruals that Sloan (1996) documents is due largely to abnormal accruals. The results are robust to five alternative measures of abnormal accruals, and still hold when I estimate abnormal accruals after controlling for major unusual but largely nondiscretionary accruals. The latter finding is consistent with the notion that the market overprices the portion of abnormal accruals stemming from managerial discretion.