We reexamine prior studies’ conclusion that accruals are less persistent than
cash, focusing on two aspects of persistence that are crucial to determining
its properties. The first (time specificity) refers to the fact that persistence describes
how current-period shocks to income translate into next-period income.
Traditional measures of accruals are, however, functions of current- and noncurrent-
period transactions.We show that the inclusion of non-current-period
transactions leads to a downward (upward) bias on the persistence of accruals
(cash flows). We develop alternative measures of accruals and cash flows that
are not misaligned and show that the differential persistence of cash flows over
accruals is more than 70% smaller using these measures. The second aspect of
persistence is firm-specificity. Specifically, we evaluate persistence using firmspecific
estimations and find that more than 85% of firms show no evidence
that accruals are less persistent than cash flows.