Healy (1983) derives the manager's decision rule for choosing discretionary
accruals when his employment horizon is two periods. The choice of discretionary accruals in period one fixes his decision in the second period because
discretionary accruals are constrained to sum to zero over these two periods.
Fig. 1 depicts discretionary accruals in the first period as a function of earnings
before discretionary accruals. These results are discussed in three cases.