Abnormal accruals in international settings: a comparative study of Japan, Thailand and the U.S.A.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how abnormal accruals, vis-à-vis, the quality of accounting, is related to the idiosyncrasies of specific country settings. We focus our study on pre- and post-Asian financial crisis (AFC) Japan, pre-AFC Thailand and pre- and post-2000-01 recession United States. We observe that in Japan income enhancing abnormal accruals were positively associated with both long-term and short-term debt financing after the AFC, a period of time when Japanese companies faced challenging circumstances with respect to profitability and several Japanese banks came under the spotlight of international institutions for excessive non-performing loans. We conclude that because of the keiretsu associations between the firms and banks, in difficult times, Japanese banks allow firms to use abnormal accruals for reporting higher earnings. For pre-AFC Thailand, earnings increasing abnormal accruals were positively associated with short-term financing.