Do Initial Public Offering Firms Manage Accruals? Evidence from Individual Accounts
29 Pages Posted: 28 Jun 2011 Last revised: 19 Apr 2017
Date Written: May 1, 2011
Abstract
We examine whether initial public offering (IPO) firms exercise discretion over an individual accrual account on the balance sheet - the allowance for uncollectible accounts - and an individual accrual account on the income statement - bad debt expense. Our research design exploits a unique disclosure requirement related to these accounts (i.e., the ex post disclosure of write-offs of uncollectible accounts), which enables us to develop refined expectation models. We provide evidence that IPO firms have conservative, not aggressive, allowances in the annual periods adjacent to their stock offerings. In fact, the average IPO firm has an allowance that is over four-times leading write-offs. We also provide evidence that IPO firms record larger, not smaller, bad debt expense and are less likely to record income-increasing bad debt expense than matched non-IPO firms. These results challenge the view that IPO firms understate receivables-related accrual accounts.
Keywords: initial public offering, earnings management, allowance for uncollectible accounts, bad debt expense
JEL Classification: M13, M41, M48, G24, K22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Paper statistics
Recommended Papers
-
Detecting Earnings Management: A New Approach
By Patricia Dechow, Amy P. Hutton, ...
-
A Review of the Earnings Management Literature and its Implications for Standard Setting
-
Errors in Estimating Accruals: Implications for Empirical Research
By Daniel W. Collins and Paul Hribar
-
The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting
By John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, ...
-
The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting
By John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, ...
-
On the Association between Voluntary Disclosure and Earnings Management
By Ron Kasznik
-
Performance Matched Discretionary Accrual Measures
By S.p. Kothari, Andrew J. Leone, ...
-
The Quality of Accruals and Earnings: The Role of Accrual Estimation Errors
By Ilia D. Dichev and Patricia Dechow
