دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی شواهد بیشتر در مورد روابط اقلام تعهدی و جریان های نقدی آینده - وایلی 2017

Abstract

Focusing only on operating accruals in accrual-based studies results in a loss of information and noisy measures of both accrual and cash flow components of earnings. Thus, we examine the relative importance of working capital accruals, non-current operating accruals, and financing accruals with regard to future cash flows from operations (CFO). Using Australian data, we provide evidence that both working capital and non-current operating accruals are important for explaining future CFO but that the contribution of financing accruals is not significant. Moreover, the asset component of accruals plays a more important role in explaining future CFO than the liability component.

7. Conclusions

In this study, we examine an important question about the usefulness of accruals in explaining future CFO in the Australian context: Does the categorisation of accruals into working capital, non-current operating and financing components improve the ability of total accruals, and thus of earnings, to explain future CFO? We analyse a large sample of 17,153 firm-year observations related to 2,261 unique firms over the 1992–2011 period. Our regression models are estimated using a panel data approach known as the random-effects method with standard errors clustered by firms.

Our results suggest that both working capital and non-current operating accruals are relevant in explaining future CFO but that the relevance of financing accruals is not significant. In addition, working capital accruals make a greater contribution to earnings’ ability to explain future CFO than non-current operating accruals. We decompose working capital accruals, non-current operating accruals and financing accruals into their underlying asset and liability components to identify the sources of their explanatory power. We find that the role of asset accruals is greater than that of the liability accruals in enhancing the explanatory power of accruals, and thus earnings, for future CFO. We also examine the relative importance of working capital accruals, non-current operating accruals and financing accruals in explaining future CFO after partitioning firm-year observations into groups, based on industry sector, length of operating cash cycle, price-to-book ratio, asset turnover, positive and negative earnings, and positive and negative CFO. Our main inferences remain unaltered by the battery of these sensitivity tests. Our results are also robust to estimations of our regression models across years and across pre- and post-IFRS adoption periods and when we increase the forecasting horizon from 1 to 4 years.