Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Income Smoothing Due To Unemployment Concerns, Jeffrey Ng, Tharindra Ranasinghe, Guifeng Shi, I-Hwa Yang
Income Smoothing Due To Unemployment Concerns, Jeffrey Ng, Tharindra Ranasinghe, Guifeng Shi, I-Hwa Yang
Research Collection School Of Accountancy
Economic theory predicts that top executives and lower-level employees have incentives to smooth income due to compensating wage differential costs and fear of job loss, respectively. Following Agrawal and Matsa (JFE, 2013) who rely on exogenous variations in unemployment insurance benefits to examine how unemployment concerns affect corporate leverage, we examine the link between such benefits and income smoothing. We find that when unemployment insurance benefits are higher and concerns about unemployment are hence lower, there is less income smoothing. This relation is stronger when employees face higher unemployment risk and weaker when the firms’ information and internal control environments …