and earnings manipulation, the downward payoff of loser stocks with high accruals largely drives the accrual … amount of income-decreasing special items in subsequent years. Most of momentum profit among high-accrual firms is … attributable to the high discretionary accrual group. Our findings indicate that due to the joint force of earnings overestimation …

accrual-based trading strategies using the balance sheet method documented in Sloan (1996). This paper contributes to the … accruals literature by investigating and documenting the systematic errors in estimating accruals in the presence of mergers … returns to firms that engage in mergers and have high accruals, which to our knowledge is not previously documented. We …