Understanding the Accrual Anomaly

Abstract

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms optimally adjust their capital investment in response to discount rate changes. Consistent with the discount-rate hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future returns increases with the correlations of accruals with past and current stock returns; (ii) controlling for invest- ment substantially reduces the magnitude of the accrual anomaly; (iii) the ex-ante expected returns of various accrual strategies have been stable at around 5% per annum over the past 35 years; (iv) the accounting reliability of various accrual components is inversely related to their cross-correlations with investment-to-assets; and finally (v) high accrual firms have similar cor- porate governance and entrenchment indexes as low accrual firms, suggesting that the accrual anomaly is unlikely to be driven by investor overreaction to over-investment.