The Accounting Review Vol. 58 No. 1 1983
The Effects of Outliers on the Cross-Sectional Distributional Properties of Financial Ratios.
Abstract
This study extends previous research concerning the cross-sectional distributional properties of financial ratios. Deakin [1976] showed that ten of 11 financial ratios analyzed for manufacturing firms were not normally distributed, and that standard transformation techniques also did not result in normality. In the current study, the same 11 financial ratios analyzed by Deakin are examined for the period 1950-1979 for large samples of manufacturing firms. Using standard statistical techniques to identify outliers, it is then shown that the presence of outliers has a tremendous influence on the parameter estimates for the distributions. After deleting outliers, normality or approximate normality was achieved for most of the distributions. Similar results were achieved for industry analyses.
- DOI
- 10.2308/tar-4491612
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 115-128
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref