THE ROLE OF DISCRETIONARY ACCRUALS IN EARNINGS MANAGEMENT OF LISTED COMPANIES IN TEHRAN STOCK EXCHANGE (TSE)

The earning management literature attempts to understand why managers manipulate earnings, how they do so and the consequences of this treatment. These questions are the focus on a significant area of inquiry within financial reporting research. Operating cash flow is difficult to manage, unless firms intentionally front load or defer the recognition of cash accompanying revenue or expense. Therefore operating cash flow should be a good measurement of the firm's operating performance. So, it is expected, a bad performer has a strong incentive to employ income-increasing accounting strategies, while a good performer in general has relatively weak incentives to employ income-increasing accounting strategies. Therefore, it is expected that operating cash flow and discretionary accruals (as surrogate to earning management) represent a significant adverse relationship. So, relationship between these variables is examined in the period of 1381-1382 (estimation period) for TSE firms. For estimating of discretionary accrual Modified Jones Model is used and event period for this purpose is 1377-1382.
The results show that TSE firms do earning management when operating performance is poor and they tend to choose income-increasing accounting strategies.