FINANCIAL AUTONOMY AND ACCOUNTING INFORMATION QUALITY IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: EVIDENCE FROM CASH FLOW PERSISTENCE
Accounting information quality; public sector; cash flow persistence; financial autonomy; accruals.
This article investigates whether the degree of financial autonomy of Brazilian municipalities influences the quality of accounting information, objectively measured by the persistence of operating cash flows and the predictive capacity of accrual surplus. Moving away from the perceptual approaches predominant in the literature, the study adopts two objective proxies for quality extracted directly from financial statements and tests their determinants on a panel of Brazilian municipalities. The methodology combines two econometric models: Model 1 estimates the persistence and predictive utility of cash flows and surplus, adapting Farshadfar, Schneider, and Bewley (2022); in turn, Model 2 regresses these quality measures on financial autonomy variables derived from Thoa and Nhi (2022). It is expected that municipalities with greater financial autonomy will show a positive impact related to the persistence of net cash flows and accrual surplus. Furthermore, it is foreseeable that the accrual surplus component will have an incremental capacity to predict future cash flows. This study contributes to the integration of perspectives on public finance, accrual quality, and institutional governance, offering objective and replicable evidence on the determinants of informational quality in the Brazilian public sector.