Abnormal Accruals in Newly Public Companies: Opportunistic Misreporting or Economic Activity?
研究发现新上市公司在IPO当年的高应计并非源于管理层机会主义误报，而是由IPO资金投入营运资本等正常经济活动所致，为识别真实误报提供了更有效的指标。
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 contrast to the notion that managers benefit from inflating accruals through an inflated issue price, inflated post-IPO equity values, and increased insider trading profits, we find no evidence of a relation between abnormal accruals and these outcomes. Instead, consistent with these accruals resulting from normal economic activity, we find that these accruals are attributable to the investment of IPO proceeds in working capital and that controlling for the amount of IPO proceeds invested in working capital produces a more powerful accrual-based measure of misreporting. This paper was accepted by Gérard Cachon, accounting.