Financial Accounting Research
Year:2012 | Volume:4 | Issue:3 (13)|Papers Count:11

In recent studies, findings show that abnormal accruals have incremental information content about future cash flows. In other word, abnormal accruals are not from misestimate and have news about future cash flows. Therefore, in the present study, we test information content of abnormal accruals in predicting future cash flows in Tehran Stock Exchange. This paper empirically investigates whether abnormal accruals for the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) during 1380-1389 provide incremental insight into future cash flows. Results show a significant positive association between abnormal accruals and one-year-ahead operating cash flows. This provides a rationale for the pricing of abnormal accruals by the market and suggests that abnormal accruals are not merely the products of noise in the accruals-estimation process. However, these results are conditional upon the probability of one-year-ahead bankruptcy risk.

According to cost accounting, there is a symmetric relation between costs and activity volume. But recent research revealed that costs decrease less when activity falls than they increase when activity rises. This asymmetric cost behavior is termed as “cost stickiness”. In this research, reversal of cost stickiness in subsequent period, observation period, continuous sales decline, GDP growth, assets and number of employees are considered as probable determinant factors on cost stickiness and the impact of these factors is examined on the stickiness of cost of goods sold and sales, general and administrative costs. According to the results, stickiness of sales, general and administrative costs is reversed in subsequent period and if sales decrease for two years, the stickiness of cost of goods sold and sales, general and administrative costs decreases in second year and stickiness of both cost of goods sold and sales, general and administrative costs is increased when assets increases. Finally there was no evidence about the impact of observation period, GDP growth and number of employees on the cost stickiness.

In this study the effects of financial leverage and operating leverage on cost of capital is studied.Statistical method used in this the study to test the hypotheses is correlation analysis, by calculating correlation coefficient of the variables under study, and testing the hypotheses. The results showed that in Tehran Stock Exchange relationship between capital costs and operating leverage and financial leverage varies from industry to industry. While the capital costs associated with operating leverage and financial leverage is positive in some industries, it is positive and significant in the others, and negative and significant in the remaining. Therefore, findings of the relationship between operating leverage and financial leverage with cost of capital among industries is inconclusive. Also, the finding of this study indicates that the relationship between cost of capital and capital structure (debt to equity) until reaching the optimal point, is a negative and linear. By increasing the amount of debt, cost of capital is reduced and after passing the optimal point (due to excessive use of debt and increasing the risk of bankruptcy), the cost of equity capital with structure has a positive linear relationship. However, the correlation of each company is different.

Investment under uncertainty is one of the issues that have captured attention of financial management specialists for a long time. When deciding to invest, investors consider different factors among which paying attention to given firms’ performance indices affects investor’s decision. Therefore, recognition of factors affecting firms’ performance is of great importance.The present study mainly aims at investigating the relationship between environment risk, firm strategy and capital structure with the performance of listed firms during 1381-87 (2002-2008). Independent variables of this research are as follow: economic risk, market risk, sales growth, asset growth, firm growth potential, cash ratio and debt ratio. Also, criteria used for the performance of the firm (as dependent variables) include free cash flow per share and return on equity. The research method is descriptive-causal; data collection method is library research; and the data is gathered from the Stock Exchange and firms’ reports. In this study, univariate and multivariate regressions through panel data and pooling data were used in order to determine the significance of the relationship between independent and dependent variables.Findings indicate that there is significant relationship between environment risk and free cash flow per share, between environment risk and return on equity and between capital structure and free cash flow per share.

The relation between stock returns and earnings is sensitive to the business cycle. In particular, the Earnings Response Coefficient has been shown to be higher during economic boom period compared to the recession period. In this research, we investigate the relationship between earnings conservatism and business cycle in the companies listed in the Tehran stock exchange. To conduct this study, 164 listed companies in Tehran stock exchange were selected during 1377-1388. Our measure of conservatism uses the regression identified by Basu (1997). In this research, we demonstrate that the conservatism and value relevance of current earnings is actually higher during economic recessions. We further demonstrate that the value-relevance of expected future earnings is higher during boom period, meaning that the association between historical accounting information and future growth opportunities would be weakened.

The main objective of this research is to measure intellectual capital and investigate its effect on efficiency as a measure of performance evaluation among 3 types of industry, that are, medicinal products industry, chemical products industry and automobile and parts industry. In this study, firstly using DEA technique, efficiency levels of DMUs (considering their financial information and ratios) as a unique and integrated measure of performance have been calculated and then the effects of IC and its components, including human capital, structural capital, and employed capital on performance (calculated efficiency) have been evaluated. The results derived are as follow irrespective of the financial leverage and stock price effects on performance: The human capital relates negatively to performance in all types of industries. However, this relationship is significant except for medicinal products industry. Irrespective of insignificance, the effect of structural capital on performance in all industries excluding medicinal products industry is positive. The employed capital is positively related to performance in all types of industries, although this relationship is significant only in chemical products industry and automobile and parts industry. Finally, the intellectual capital affects performance negatively in all industries, but it is significant only in automobile and parts industry. Considering obtained results, it can be concluded that type of industry cannot moderate substantially the relationship between IC and performance.

Due to the different time periods with different market conditions and economic conditions in different countries, growth and value stocks has different efficiency. One of the recommendations in order to obtain optimum efficiency is diversification. As the time to select a suitable portfolio, using bonds and other securities can reduce portfolio risk and balancing the potential risk and reward of investing, choose an appropriate portfolio of stock involves the use of different investment methods and both value and growth stocks should be considered in the portfolio to reduce risk and obtain better results. Despite the importance of value and growth stocks, but certain categories of growth, value and blended companies has not been provided. This paper tries to use financial data of listed companies in the Tehran Stock Exchange for time period 1384-1388 and Fuzzy C-Means Clustering (FCM) to classify stocks of companies. The results of this study show that most of these companies lie in the blended portfolio, but their tendency is growing portfolio.