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Abstract:
This paper examines accounting earnings and the associated accrual and cash flow components in the years surrounding an initial public offering (IPO) to study the incentives and opportunities for firms to manage earnings when going public. We identify firm and offering characteristics that may be related to the amount of earnings management in IPO firms. We find that age and ownership retention by original entrepreneurs are significantly negatively related to industry-adjusted discretionary accounting accruals. In addition, we find that net income and cash flow from operations increase in the fiscal year prior to the IPO, and decline significantly in the year of the IPO. Net income continues to decline subsequently but not cash flows. Discretionary working capital and total accruals in the year of the IPO are negatively related to future cash flows and the change in net income between the pre-and post-IPO period. Taken together, the evidence is consistent with a scenario where firms either time an IPO immediately after a year of unusually high cash flow or boost cash flows right before the IPO, and then use accounting accruals to sustain reported net income in the year of the IPO. Thus, the evidence is consistent with the IPO firm attempting to manage investor perceptions with discretionary accruals.

Abstract:
We examine empirically whether earnings management as measured by discretionary accounting accruals explain post-issue stock return underperformance for IPO firms. We find that high discretionary accounting accruals are related to negative abnormal stock returns with high statistical significance. For example, a trading strategy of a short position in IPO firms with high discretionary accruals and a long position in IPOs with low discretionary accruals result in a mean (median) excess return of 102% (83.5%) in the 36-month period beginning after the first fiscal year end of the IPO. The evidence is consistent with Ritter's [1991] conjecture that investors are systematically overoptimistic about the growth prospects of IPO firms. The high discretionary accounting accruals seem to be associated with initial overoptimism of investors with subsequent revelations about the appropriateness of the accruals causing a subsequent downward revision in stock prices.

Abstract:
We find evidence that initial public offering (IPO) firms, on average, have high positive issue-year earnings and abnormal accruals, followed by poor long-run earnings and negative abnormal accruals. The IPO-year abnormal, and not expected, accruals explain the cross-sectional variation in post-issue earnings and stock returns. The results are robust with respect to alternative abnormal accruals and earnings performance measures. IPO firms adopt more income-increasing depreciation policies when they deviate from similar prior performance same industry non-issuers, and they provide significantly less for uncollectible accounts receivable than their matched non-issuers. The results taken together suggest opportunistic earnings management partially explains the new issues anomaly.