TAit is firm’s total assets at the end of the fiscal year
As Kothari et al. (2005) argue, the inclusion of a constant term in the Jones (1991) model provides an additional control for heteroscedasticity not alleviated by deflating the variables with total as sets. A constant term also mitigates problems arising from omitted size variables and produces discretionary accrual measures that are more symmetric, overcoming model misspecifications and making the power of the test comparisons more clear. Finally, the inclusion of a profitability measure(ROA) is designed as the effectiveness of the performance matching methodology. The discretionary accruals from the modified Jones(1991) model were defined as the residuals from estimating Eq.(5a):
DACit=ACCit/TAit-1-α(1/TAit-1)+β(∆SALESit/TAt-1)
+γ (PPEit/TAit-1)gROA (5b)
In order to estimate the performance – matcher discretionary accruals we followed Kothari et al. (2005) and matched each firm year observation with another from the same industry classification and year, and with the closest return on assets (ROA).The final step was to define the Jones-model performance –matched discretionary accruals for firm in year t as the discretionary accruals for Eq. (5b) minus the matched firm’s Jones – model discretionary accruals for year t. As Kothari et al.(2005) argue, the performance matching approach based on ROA and using the Jones model produces a more salient measure of discretionary accruals since the means and medians in performance-related sub samples are closest to zero more often than the other measures.
The absolute value of performance-matched discretionary accruals(