External Monitoring, ESG, and Information Content of Discretionary Accruals

Abstract

Discretionary accruals reflect the management’s accounting choices made within the flexibility of accounting standards. Discretionary accruals can be used by the management to better reflect the economic value of the firm and to signal their private information about a firm’s future prospects to the market, but they can also be used opportunistically by managers. However, the prior literature documents mixed evidence related to the information content in discretionary accruals. Thus, we examine the association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion to provide further evidence on the information content in discretionary accruals. Moreover, as greater external monitoring and rigorous ESG management allow less room for manager’s manipulation of discretionary accruals, we investigate whether greater external monitoring by institutional owners and higher ESG scores moderate the relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ disagreements on long-term EPS growth forecasts. We find a positive association between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion, which suggests there is low information content in discretionary accruals. Furthermore, we find that a greater concentration in institutional ownership, greater blockholders’ institutional ownership, and a positive ESG score mitigate the positive relationship between discretionary accruals and analysts’ forecast dispersion. Thus, better external monitoring and higher quality ESG enhance the information credibility of a firm’s disclosure.