Can Managers Use Discretionary Accruals to Ease Financial Constraints? Evidence from Discretionary Accruals Prior to Investment
研究发现，面临融资约束但有良好投资机会的企业，在投资前会显著提高可自由支配应计项目，以此向市场传递积极信号，从而更容易获得股权和债务融资，缓解融资约束并提升企业价值。
ABSTRACT: Despite a large literature on discretionary accruals, how the use of discretionary accruals impacts corporate financial decisions is not well understood. We hypothesize that a financially constrained firm with valuable projects can use discretionary accruals to credibly signal positive prospects, enabling it to raise capital to make the investments. We examine a large panel of firms during 1987 to 2009 and find that financially constrained firms with good investment opportunities have significantly higher discretionary accruals prior to investment compared to their unconstrained counterparts. Constrained high-accrual firms have higher earnings-announcement returns than constrained low-accrual firms, obtain more equity and debt financing, and invest in projects that appear to improve performance. These results provide supporting evidence that the use of discretionary accruals can help constrained firms with valuable projects ease those constraints and increase firm value. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources indicated in the text.