Accruals correlate closely with the determinants of conditional equity premium at both the firm and the aggregate levels. The common component of firm-level accruals, which cannot be diversified away by aggregation, explains the positive relation between aggregate accruals and future stock...

We propose new multifactor models to explain the accruals anomaly. Our baseline model represents an application of Merton's ICAPM, in which the key factors represent (innovations on) the term and small-value spreads. The model shows large explanatory power for cross-sectional risk premia...