The Usefulness of Measures of Consistency of Discretionary Components of Accruals in the Detection of Earnings Management
提出两种度量应计项目各组成部分一致性的指标，并检验其在检测盈余管理中的增量有用性，发现这些信息能提高对人为操纵应计项目的识别能力。
Abstract: Prior research has shown the prevalence of measurement error in models used to estimate aggregate discretionary accruals. In these models, the incremental information content of the various components of accruals is ignored. Limited prior research and data gathered from firms under Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) litigation indicate that managers use either one or more than one component of accruals simultaneously, in a consistent way to manipulate bottom‐line earnings in a given direction. I propose two measures that capture the consistency between the discretionary components of accruals and test their significance in earnings management (EM) detection in firms that have artificially added accrual manipulation and firms that were targeted by the SEC for accrual manipulation. There is evidence that this information is incrementally useful in detecting EM. This finding paves the way for improvements in the discretionary accruals measure by including consistency information from the components of aggregate accruals.