Investigating the effect of Income Smoothing on Information Content of Current Earnings about Predicting Future Earnings

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Abstract

The result of many researches show that investors prefer smoothed incomes. On this regard managers try to smooth income and its growing rate. On the base one classification of management incentives for income smoothing, managers smooth incomes either for purpose of garbling of information and their benefits or in order to transforming and reporting the insider information about future earnings. The purpose of this research is to investigate managers’ incentives from income smoothing in listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. In this research, income smoothing is measured by negative correlation changes in discretionary accruals and changes in pre-discretionary income using data during 1376-80. Then, by using the Collins et al model expanded by Tucker & Zarowin, the relationship between future earnings per share and current return entering income smoothing index in the model of 1380-82 is investigated. Results show that current stock price of companies’ which smooth in larger degree, contain lower information about future earnings. Therefore, income smoothing is mostly done in order to garbling not to convey insider management information

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