Accruals and managerial operating decisions over the firm life cycle
Name
85835990-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
6 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
60004adb194da2391dccf69626d3b7d6
Author(s)
Liu, Michelle M
Advisor(s)
S.P. Kothari.
Date Issued
2006
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-75).
Subjects
Sloan School of Management.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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