Accruals and managerial operating decisions over the firm life cycle

Abstract

This paper explores how accruals capture managerial operating decisions that evolve over a firm's life cycle. I argue that growing firms face different operating environments and have fundamentally different accruals properties than those of mature and declining firms. I provide evidence that accruals vary with changes in a firm's operating environment over its life cycle. I show in one example that by ignoring life cycle fundamentals, previous empirical methods would likely misclassify this variation in accruals as reflecting systematic differences in a firm's "accounting quality". I suggest empirical techniques to mitigate incorrect inferences about accounting quality and to better understand how operating decisions affect accruals.