Designing a Firm’s Rating Model in Terms of Accounting Earnings Quality

Accounting information transparency is a very important issue for all financial statement users, so there are a lot of researches in this area. Transparency of accounting information has a variety of aspects one of the most important of which is earnings quality. The main purpose of this research is to design a firm’s rating model in terms of earnings quality in order to assess the accounting earnings quality of firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange. Since the earnings quality has different dimensions, this research evaluates it from three dimensions including earnings time series features; relations among accruals, earnings, and cash flows; and information qualitative features, using eight criteria including earning persistence, predictability, smoothing, accruals quality, discretionary accruals, conservatism, value relevance and match. The important innovation of this research is designing a model to rank a firm’s earnings quality based on comprehensive criteria. The sample consists of 135 firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period from 2004 to 2017. The exploratory factor analysis method is used for rating. The rating reliability is measured using the market value added criterion. The results indicate a direct and significant correlation between a firm's earnings quality rate and the market value added.