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Study Guide

External events

Macroeconomic uncertainty and earnings smoothing

Research Seminar

This paper studies the relation between macroeconomic uncertainty and earnings smoothing. It studies the US oil, iron and gold commodity firms’ quarterly data in the 1990-2019 period. The findings show that oil and iron firms use both accruals and real operations to systematically engage in income-decreasing (income-increasing) earnings management in quarters when the average quarterly price, quarterly price volatility, and the future commodity prices are high (low). The earnings smoothing is economically significant. A placebo test using gold firms shows that where macroeconomic uncertainty is lesser, firms do not engage in earnings smoothing. Further, this study shows that earnings smoothing motivated by macroeconomic uncertainty is informative, as it helps investors and analysts predict future earnings. This paper contributes to prior earnings smoothing literature, to the literature on earnings management in commodity firms, and it has policy implications.