We document pervasive evidence of reversals in firm-level working capital accruals over adjacent fiscal years. We demonstrate that the majority of these accrual reversals relate to ‘good' accruals that: (i) correctly anticipate future benefits; (ii) lead to higher earnings persistence; and (iii)...

Previous research finds that EPS growth is difficult to predict and reasons that much of the observed variation in valuation multiples is due to mispricing (e.g., Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny, 1994; Chan, Karceski, and Lakonishok, 2003; Israel, Laursen, and Richardson, 2021). We revisit these...

This paper provides a practitioner-oriented review of the accrual anomaly in Sloan (1996) and related subsequent research. We begin with two simple examples that illustrate the computation and interpretation of accruals. We next review Sloan's (1996) original paper and related subsequent...