Performance measures quality and value relevance in flow-through organisational structures: the case of Canadian income trusts

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.