Accruals and managerial operating decisions over the firm life cycle
Author(s)
Liu, Michelle M![Thumbnail](/bitstream/handle/1721.1/37251/85835990-MIT.pdf.jpg?sequence=4&isAllowed=y)
DownloadFull printable version (5.996Mb)
Other Contributors
Sloan School of Management.
Advisor
S.P. Kothari.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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).
Date issued
2006Department
Sloan School of ManagementPublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Sloan School of Management.