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This paper aims to investigate the combined effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and the firm life cycle on the degree of accrual-based earnings management of publicly traded companies in the USA and Brazilian stock markets.

The EPU index used was the one developed by Baker et al. (2016), the Kothari et al. (2005) model was used in the main analysis to obtain the discretionary accruals and the classification of firms into different life cycles was based on the Dickinson (2011) approach, which relies on the sign of operating, investment and financing cash flows. The methodology includes correlation matrix and panel regression with fixed effects.

The overall results for the USA sample suggest that economic policy uncertainty does have a heterogeneous influence on the firms’ accrual earnings management conditional on their life cycle where firms in the introduction, growth and decline stages decrease this practice when policy uncertainty increases. For the Brazilian case, in general, there is no combined effect between these variables. These contrasting findings can be associated with either the different underlying characteristics of both stock markets or the reduced sample size for the emerging market analyzed.

This research contributes to the earnings management literature examining how policy uncertainty is related to accruals manipulation under different life cycle stages and institutional environments. It is also one of the first studies to explore this conditioning effect.