More generally, firms can use their reporting discretion to mask or misstate economic performance.
For instance, firms can overstate reported earnings to achieve certain earnings targets or report extraordinary performance in specific instances, such as an equity issuance (e.g., Teoh et al., 1998a).
Similarly, in years of poor performance, firms can boost their earnings using reserves and allowances or aggressive revenue recognition practices.
Common to these examples is that earnings are temporarily inflated due to accrual choices but cash flows are unaffected. Thus, we analyze the magnitude of accruals relative to the magnitude of operating cash flow as a proxy for the extent to which firms exercise discretion in reporting earnings.9 The ratio is computed as the median absolute value of total accruals for an industry within a country scaled by the corresponding median absolute value of cash flow from operations, where the scaling controls for differences in firm size and performance.
Cash flow from operations is calculated using the balance-sheet approach because U.S. style cash flow statements are generally not available for our sample of private and public European companies.
Following Dechow et al. (1995), we compute the accrual component of earnings as (∆ total current assets – ∆ cash) – (∆ total current liabilities – ∆ short-term debt) – depreciation expense, where ∆ denotes the change over the last fiscal
year.
If a firm does not report information on cash or short-term debt, then the changes in both variables are assumed to be zero.
We scale all accounting items by lagged total assets to ensure comparability across firms