Accrual Volatility as a Stock Return Predictor
July 27, 2010 - Fundamental Valuation
Does unreliability of the relationship between reported earnings and cash flow affect stock valuation? In the July 2010 version of their paper entitled “The Accrual Volatility Anomaly”, Sati Bandyopadhyay, Alan Huang and Tony Wirjanto investigate whether the market penalizes firms that consistently report earnings that are different from cash flows, as measured by accrual volatility. They define accrual volatility as the standard deviation of the ratio of accruals to sales over the past 16 quarters. They focus on total accruals, defined as changes in working capital minus deprecation and amortization.Using quarterly accounting data and monthly stock returns for a broad sample of U.S. stocks over the period 1976-2008, they find that: Keep Reading