Accruals and Long-Term Nonfinancial Assets and Liabilities

This study proposes improvements to accrual models. Existing models explain how working capital maps cash flows from operations into earnings and how this mapping reflects accounting conservatism. However, except for fixed asset depreciation, accruals associated with long-term nonfinancial balance sheet accounts (e.g., intangible assets, goodwill, deferred revenues) are not modeled. We show that these unmodeled accruals have grown in importance over time and that a significant portion of them can be explained by utilizing a fundamental property of accrual accounting: most nonfinancial assets and liabilities will eventually be transferred to earnings as accruals, especially during bad times. Using a large U.S. sample for the 1988–2019 period, we document that beginning-of-year long-term nonfinancial assets and liabilities are significantly associated with total accruals and that, consistent with conditional conservatism, a greater proportion of long-term nonfinancial assets is expensed as accruals when current performance is poor. In simulations, compared to traditional models, models that include long-term nonfinancial assets and liabilities as regressors are more likely to detect seeded discretionary accruals between 2% and 20% of total assets, suggesting that these expanded models should be used to decrease the likelihood of making erroneous inferences.