Income Smoothing Practices: Evidence from Vietnam Stock Exchange Market

The study aims to: (i) provide empirical evidence on income smoothing practice of listed companies in Vietnam Stock Exchange; and (ii) investigate the impacts of firms’ profitability, financial leverage, liquidity, and audit firm size combined with several control variables proxied by listing age, firm size, audit tenure, and board size on income smoothing of Vietnamese listed companies from 2009 to 2021. Using the purposive sampling method, the studied samples are 81 companies making of 1053 observations in total. Data are analyzed using logistic regression with dependent variable which is income smoothing categorized based on the Eckel’s index. The study's findings indicate that while other variables have no effect on income smoothing practices, financial leverage, audit firm size, and company size have a substantial impact. The findings of this study also suggest that income smoothing is very viable in Vietnam, similar to that in Japan but considerably less common than in Singapore and China.