计算Accrual的时候的不同计算方式汇总20200731

简介

在使用ACCRUAL作为PROXY的时候，通常头疼于数据库中的不同变量应该如何排列组合，之前找到一篇由 Larson et. al (2017) 发的会计相关论文中给出了一个汇总，主要汇总的如何计算total accrual 和 operating accrual。非常好用！
文章全称为：Defining, Measuring and Modeling Accruals: A Guide for Researchers，可在SCHOLAR上面找到。

作者关于这个SURVEY的介绍

A voluminous literature examines accounting accruals. We systematically survey the definitions and empirical accrual measures used in the prior archival literature. This portion of our study is not intended to be a comprehensive survey, but rather to illustrate the diversity of accrual definitions and measurements used in the accounting literature. A Web of Science search for variants of the word “accrual” in the title of publications from The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research and Review of Accounting Studies returns 158 papers published through 2016. Of these papers, 28 are analytical, experimental or discussion papers that do not use an archival accrual measure, 4 examine a specific accrual account and 2 do not state how accruals are calculated. After excluding the aforementioned papers, we survey the accrual measures used in the 124 remaining papers. Since some papers use more than one measure of accruals, we have 157 accrual measurement observations. We classify the 157 observations based on the Compustat variables employed in each measure.

We identify 40 separate measures of accruals that we organize into five groups in Table 1. The first three groups encompass some variant of working capital accruals. The most common differences are whether to compute accruals using data from the balance sheet or statement of cash flows and whether or not to include depreciation expense. Probably because early accrual papers employed working capital accruals (Healy, 1985; Rayburn, 1986; Wilson, 1986), most accrual papers in our survey likewise employ measures of working capital accruals: 142 out of the 157 (90.4%) observations fall into one of the first three categories. Within each working capital group, various line items such as taxes payable and other current assets and liabilities are sometimes excluded. Note that many of these accrual measures capture only the origination or reversal of particular non-cash asset and liability accounts. For example, the accruals measures in group 2 incorporate depreciation and amortization accruals, but do not incorporate capital expenditures that make up the initial origination of these accruals. Groups 4 and 5 in Table 1 include the relatively small number of papers using accruals measures incorporating non-current accruals. These definitions differ based on whether they use data from the balance sheet or the statement of cash flows and on whether they include financial accruals. The two measures of accruals that come closest to our comprehensive measure of accruals are the aggregate accrual measure in Dechow (1994) and the balance-sheet-based total accruals measure in Richardson et al. (2005). Dechow (1994) measures aggregate accruals as the difference between earnings before extraordinary items and discontinued operations (IB) and the change in the cash balance (CHE). While very similar to our comprehensive measure of accruals, this measure misclassifies cash distributions to stockholders as accruals. For example, if a firm pays a dividend to common stockholders, net income is unaffected, but the cash balance falls. Thus, this measure mistakenly treats the cash dividend as an accrual. Our measure avoids this problem by using the change in common equity (CEQ) in place of IB. Richardson et al. (2005) measure total accruals as the change in non-cash working capital plus the change in net noncurrent operating assets plus the change in net financial assets. This measure differs from our measure of comprehensive accruals (COMPACC) in two respects. First, it classifies short-term investments (IVST) as an accrual account rather than as a cash account. We acknowledge that one could argue for either treatment, since these short-term investments are not strictly cash, but as a practical matter, they are very similar to cash. Second, they do not include ‘Non-controlling interests – non redeemable’ (MIBN) as an accrual account. This omission is an historical quirk. Compustat created this accrual account in 2009 in response to SFAS 160, which required certain minority interest to be classified in the equity section of the balance sheet.

The Survey

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