Conclusion
The objective of this study is to provide empirical evidence on the earnings persistence
and the market pricing of reported earnings and the cash flow and accrual components of Thai
listed firms. Our sample includes firms (2,325 firmyear observations) listed in the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) during 1999–2007. Our results on the persistence of current earnings with respect to one-year-ahead earnings show that current earnings are persistent with a persistence coefficient of less than 1.00 suggesting that accounting rates of accounting are mean reverting. Moreover, our empirical results on the persistence of the cash flow and accrual components suggest the higher persistence of the cash flow component, relative to the accrual component.Results on an estimation of the non-linear valuation model with the cash fl ow and accrual components show that the valuation parameters of the accrual and cash flow components
are significantly smaller than their forecasting parameters. Our results suggest that Thai stock
markets underprice both cash fl ow and accrual components and they perceive the accrual component to be more persistent than the cash flow component.We also estimate the valuation model for a profit-firm subsample. The results show that the valuation and forecasting parameters of the accrual component are not significantly different while the valuation parameter of the cash flow component is significantly smaller than its forecasting parameter,
suggesting that stock prices of Thai firms accurately reflect the persistence of the accrual component but inaccurately reflect the higher persistence of the cash flow component. Our results also suggest that Thai stock markets perceive that the accrual component is more persistent than the cash flow component. Our empirical results of Thai firms are inconsistent with empirical results of U.S. firms documented in Sloan (1996). Possible explanations
are that Thai stock markets are emerging markets with much smaller market capitalization and
trading volume, relative to developed capital markets such as U.S. stock markets, and that Thai
stock markets are not effi cient [Islam et al. (2007) and Tantipanichkul and Supattarakul (2011)].Our study contributes to the accounting literature by providing empirical evidence on the persistence of earnings and their cash flow and accrual components of emerging markets (i.e., Thai stock markets). Our results are beneficial to financial analysts and investors of Thai listed firms in that when they are predicting a firm’s future earnings in an estimation of the firm’s stock price, they should take into account the differential persistence of the cash flow and accrual components of current earnings. In addition, our results that stock prices
do not accurately reflect information in the cash flow and accrual components of earnings with
respect to one-year-ahead earnings suggest that Thai investors can possibly earn abnormal returns from the mispricing of these earnings components.