Relationship between total accruals and earnings smoothness in Chinese market

Abstract

This paper studies on the relationship between the total accruals and the earnings smoothness in Chinese market. The total accruals and earnings smoothness both are important parts of earnings management and can be thought as proxies of earnings quality. Although there is a lack of empirical evidence, I develop the hypothesis there is a negative relationship between them. In this paper, I concentrate on the Chinese firms from 1998 to 2017. Relying on the regression method, I get the result meeting my hypothesis that the total accruals have a significant and negative relationship with the earnings smoothness in Chinese firms. The contribution of my study is to provide an empirical evidence for the negative relationship between total accruals and earnings smoothness which supports that the accruals can be used to manage smooth earnings in Chinese market.