Discretionary Accruals as a Proxy for Earnings Management
Discretionary accruals are commonly used as a proxy for earnings management, and
different models have been suggested in the literature to estimate discretionary accruals. In
this paper, we use the performance-adjusted discretionary accruals (REDCA) measure. The
measure has been considered a better proxy for earnings management because current items
are subject to more manipulation in a short period than long-term items (see, for example,
ALM; Klein 2002; Kothari et al. 2002). Moreover, the adjustment of discretionary current
accruals with the performance factor makes them comparable across firms from different
industry groups (e.g., Kothari et al. 2002; Klein 2002). While ALM also uses the Portfolio
Performance Adjusted Discretionary Current Accruals (PADCA) measure, we restrict our
analyses to REDCA because the latter better reflects earnings management, as argued by
ALM.9