While this reasoning leads to specific predictions about the beginning-of-year distributions of current assets and current liabilities conditional on the level of earnings, we do not test statistical hypotheses here (and in Section 3.2) for two reasons: First, there is little guidance in the accounting literature about the relation between levels of working capital and levels of earnings; while the results below show that the conditional distributions are related to the level of earnings, the relation is not linear and the variances of the conditional distribu-tions are not constant