We find that investors price securities in a manner that reflects their awareness of
accruals quality: lower-quality accruals are associated with higher costs of debt,
smaller price multiples on earnings, and larger equity betas. Moreover, accruals
quality loads as a separate factor in explaining variation in excess returns when
added to both one- and three-factor asset-pricing regressions. Our results are
consistent across securities (debt and common equity), estimation procedures
(pooled regressions and annual regressions), variable specification (raw and decile),
research design (cross-sectional levels versus over-time changes), and proxies for
accruals quality (standard deviation of residuals from Dechow–Dichev type models
and absolute values of abnormal accruals), and are robust to the inclusion of control
variables known to affect costs of capital