The Impact of Corporate Diversifications on Discretionary Accrual Quality and Earnings Persistence: Diversification Effect Hypothesis Test

Earnings persistence is one of the qualitative characteristics of accounting earnings that is based on accounting information and helps investors in assessing the company's future earnings and cash flows. In addition, the reported earnings figure is important for investors and influences their decisions. In estimating their expected future earnings and cash flows, investors do not only pay attention to the accounting earnings figure and pay more attention to the stable part of the earnings than the unstable part. The position of how capital market stakeholders process accounting information, especially earnings and its components, has always been of interest to capital market stakeholders. Accordingly, the present study investigates the effect of corporate diversification on the discretionary accrual quality and earnings persistence. This research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-correlational in terms of research method. In other words, in this study, the existence of relationship and correlation between variables through regression is investigated. In order to achieve the above objectives, two hypotheses were formulated. Therefore, in order to test the research hypothesis, a sample of 100 firms was selected from the firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the period 2014 to 2019. Multivariate regression model based on combined data was used to test the research hypothesis. The results of this study show that there is a positive and significant relationship between corporate diversifications and discretionary accrual quality, which means that with increasing corporate diversifications, discretionary accrual quality will increase. Also, corporate diversifications has a significant positive impact on earnings persistence, which means that with increasing corporate diversifications, earnings persistence will increasing.