Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the combined effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the firm life cycle on the degree of accrual-based earnings management of publicly traded companies in the USA and Brazilian stock markets.

Design/methodology/approach

The EPU index used was the one developed by Baker et al. (2016), the Kothari et al. (2005) model was used in the main analysis to obtain the discretionary accruals and the classification of firms into different life cycles was based on the Dickinson (2011) approach, which relies on the sign of operating, investment and financing cash flows. The methodology includes correlation matrix and panel regression with fixed effects.

Findings

The overall results for the USA sample suggest that economic policy uncertainty does have a heterogeneous influence on the firms’ accrual earnings management conditional on their life cycle where firms in the introduction, growth and decline stages decrease this practice when policy uncertainty increases. For the Brazilian case, in general, there is no combined effect between these variables. These contrasting findings can be associated with either the different underlying characteristics of both stock markets or the reduced sample size for the emerging market analyzed.

Originality/value

This research contributes to the earnings management literature examining how policy uncertainty is related to accruals manipulation under different life cycle stages and institutional environments. It is also one of the first studies to explore this conditioning effect.

中文翻译：

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盈余管理，政策不确定性和公司生命周期阶段：来自美国和巴西上市公司的证据

目的

本文旨在研究经济政策不确定性（EPU）和企业生命周期对美国和巴西股票市场上市公司的基于应计制收益管理程度的综合影响。

设计/方法/方法

使用的EPU指数是Baker等开发的指数。（2016），Kothari等。主要分析中使用了（2005）模型来获得可自由支配的应计项目，并且根据Dickinson（2011）方法，将公司划分为不同的生命周期，该方法依赖于经营，投资和融资现金流的迹象。该方法包括相关矩阵和固定影响的面板回归。

发现

美国样本的总体结果表明，经济政策不确定性确实会对企业的应计收益管理产生异质影响，条件是企业的生命周期，即当政策不确定性增加时，处于引进，成长和衰退阶段的企业会减少这种做法。对于巴西的情况，通常，这些变量之间没有组合的影响。这些相反的发现可能与两个股票市场的不同潜在特征或所分析的新兴市场样本量减少有关。

创意/价值

该研究有助于盈余管理文献研究政策不确定性与不同生命周期阶段和制度环境下的应计制操纵之间的关系。这也是探索这种调节作用的首批研究之一。