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- Publisher
- Inderscience Publishers
- Copyright
- Copyright © Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. All rights reserved
- ISSN
- 1740-8008
- eISSN
- 1740-8016
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
Income trusts are rapidly emerging as a key force in Canadian capital markets and their unit market capitalisation exceeded 300 billion Canadian dollars by early 2008. One of the peculiarities of income trusts is that GAAP-derived measures, such as earnings, are replaced by non-GAAP measures, such as distributable income, as performance benchmarks. Hence, the need to pay investors a stable distribution motivates income trust managers to engage in distribution-based earnings management. Two research questions are addressed. Firstly, do income trusts use discretionary accruals to smooth EBITDA and, presumably, cash distributions to unit-holders? Secondly, do investors see through EBITDA smoothing? Our findings document that the EBITDA target deviation influences an income trust's accruals behaviour. Consistent with prior studies in dividend-focused environments, our results also suggest that investors may value positively discretionary accruals if they allow income trusts to maintain their cash distributions.
Journal
International Journal of Accounting, Auditing and Performance Evaluation – Inderscience Publishers
Published: Jan 1, 2007