Accruals for latin american firms

The relationships among earnings, accruals, and cash flows for selected Latin American countries (Mexico, Chile, and Argentina) are investigated in this study from 1990 to 2009. We find a negative relationship between accruals and cash flow across decile portfolios. More importantly, firms in decile portfolio 10 reporting relative high level of earnings relative to assets, 6.5%, have the worst level of cash flows (negative 9.7%). Results are compared to previous results for U.S. firms. Given the level of sophistication of these capital markets, results for Latin American firms are less stable than for the U.S.Results disaggregated by years show that high-accruals portfolios consistently report relative high levels of earnings but low levels of cash flow. Further, the gap between earnings and cash flow is higher after 2000. This relationship is of economic importance given that investors are very oriented towards firms yielding high earnings and might fail to realize that earnings are not always accompanied by strong levels of cash flows