Signaling over income smoothing and IFRS adoption by banks: a panel data analysis on MENA countries

Abstract

The income smoothing purposes tend to vary across firms and countries depending on firms characteristics and environment. Following an overview of hypotheses, the empirical analysis investigates whether the tendency of bank managers to convey private information over income smoothing depend on IFRS adoption through a panel data model. Regressions are estimated on an unbalanced panel of bank from different MENA economies. Factors related to the local economy, institutional background and bank's characteristics are found to control varying levels of the dependent variable across time and space. We use a panel data estimation approach in order to obtain robust results, overcoming the problems related to serially correlated error terms. Our result indicate that IFRS adoption decrease the tendency to signal over income smoothing. This appears to be because IFRS improve earnings informativeness which reduces bank manager's motivation to smooth income for communication goal.