Koerniadi, H: Accruals: Signalling or misleading?

Studies on earnings management usually hypothesise that managers manage accruals opportunistically. Few studies however, argue that managers can also use accruals to improve the value relevance of reported earnings to help investors better assess the firm‘s operating performance. While substantial evidence on managers‘ opportunistic behaviour on accruals has been documented in the literature, empirical evidence on the informativeness of accruals is scarce and inconclusive. This book examines this issue using three corporate events as the research settings. In addition, this book also examines the persistence of the accrual anomaly, an anomaly believed to be a manifestation of earnings management. The results reported in this book should yield some insights that could be useful to both stock market investors and regulators in the Pacific- Basin region whose stock market environments are closer to that of New Zealand than to the United States.