EARNINGS MANAGEMENT AND QUARTERLY DISCRETIONARY ACCRUALS LEVEL IN BRAZILIAN STOCK MARKET
Earnings management. Discretionary accruals. Quarterly earnings.
Earnings management and its incentives is becoming a frequent subject in the international and national literature. However, there is a discussion in which interim financial statement these incentives are stronger and how the level and direction of discretionary accruals behaves over the quarters. In this context, this study aims to investigate the level of quarterly discretionary accruals as a proxy for managing quarterly earnings of public Brazilian companies. Some authors show that the incentives in the fourth quarter would be higher because it is the last chance of the manager to manipulate accounting information. On the other hand, findings also show that incentives in the first, second and third quarters would be higher due to audit analytical review would be less strict. To achieve the goal, it will use Paulo (2007) earnings management by discretionary accruals model adapted, including three dummies for each quarter and the constant results represents the first quarter, in order to check the level and the direction of quarterly discretionary accruals.