Are accruals during an initial public offering opportunistic?

We find evidence that initial public offering (IPO) firms, on average, have high positive issue-year earnings and abnormal accruals, followed by poor long-run earnings and negative abnormal accruals. The IPO-year abnormal, and not expected, accruals explain the cross-sectional variation in post-issue earnings and stock returns. The results are robust with respect to alternative abnormal accruals and earnings performance measures. IPO firms adopt more income-increasing depreciation policies when they deviate from similar prior performance same industry non-issuers, and they provide significantly less for uncollectible accounts receivable than their matched non-issuers. The results taken together suggest opportunistic earnings management partially explains the new issues anomaly. Accrual accounting provides managers with discretion in the reporting of earnings. This allows financial reports to reflect managerial information about underlying economic con-ditions more accurately than is possible with a strictly mechanical reporting rule. However, if in some circumstances managers wish to mislead investors, discretion provides greater scope for obscuring true underlying firm performance. The incentives to manage earnings may be especially strong when the firm is planning to sell shares to the market, as in an initial public offering (IPO)