Abnormal accounting accruals are unusually high around stock offers, especially high for firms whose offers subsequently attract lawsuits. Accruals tend to reverse after stock offers and are negatively related to post-offer stock returns. Reversals are more pronounced and stock returns are lower for sued firms than for those that are not sued. The incidence of lawsuits involving stock offers and settlement amounts are significantly positively related to abnormal accruals around the offer and significantly negatively related to post-offer stock returns. Our results support the view that some firms opportunistically manipulate earnings upward before stock issues rendering themselves vulnerable to litigation.

Based on theory and anecdotal evidence, we argue that ongoing implicit claims between a firm and its customers, suppliers, employees, and short-term creditors create incentives for management to choose long-run income-increasing accounting methods. Variables selected to proxy for the extent to which a firm depends on these implicit claims are found to be significant in explaining cross-sectional variation in inventory and depreciation methods. These variables remain incrementally significant when we include traditional variables found to have explanatory power in prior studies (i.e., leverage, bonus compensation, tax, and regulatory/political exposure variables).