Abstract:
This research identified the relation between discretionary accruals and future earnings under the concept of business life cycle by dividing earning management according to business life cycle concepts into3 stages: 1)Growth stages 2)Maturity stages 3)Decline stages. The earning management was divided into 3 types 1)Discretionary Current accruals 2)Hight Discretionary Current accruals 3)Discretionary total accrual. The population was collected from the Stock Exchange of Thailand, excluding the financial industry,Insurance industry and rehabilitation company from year 2014 to 2018 B.E., totaling 317 companies and multiple regression analysis was also adopted for this research. The results revealed that profit management through accrual transactions correlated with future profit and future enterprise value for earning management differed over the business life cycle, implying that the executive may use the earning management to determine the direction of profit and the firms value in order to correspond to the investors expectations, particularly during maturity and decline stages, the relation as such appeared to be in the opposite direction, implying that during these stages, the executives may use the earning management techniques through discretionary total accrual to create profits as expected. Therefore, incorporating the business life cycle into analysis will increase the efficiency of decision making.