Determinants of Accounting Creativity: Empirical Analysis on Romanian SMEs in Construction Industry

Abstract

Most research on accounting creativity in our country have approached the companies that had securities admitted on trading in the capital market. But the phenomenon may occur at the level of SME which are not listed on the stock exchange as well. This motivated us to consider this type of entities for our analysis. We focused on the construction industry as it is the base of the economy development and the accounting principles for this sector are very complex. The data was requested directly from entities and manually processed. Using two different models of multiple linear regression analysis, we have estimated the level of discretionary accruals. By comparing the results, we highlighted that for our sample the first model was more relevant. We then tested the influence that entity size, indebtedness ratio, and financial difficulties exert on accounting creativity. The results of our study did not determine a relevant impact of these determinants. We conclude that further research is needed to analyse in a qualitative approach the managers' motivations for creative accounting techniques.

Keywords

• accounting creativity
• construction
• discretionary accruals
• earnings management
• SME