This study uses unbalanced panel data to construct the empirical regressions, and examines the role of the global financial crisis and institutional ownership on the earnings informativeness of firm with income smoothing. The result reveals that the earnings informativeness of income smoothing decreased after the occurrence of the crisis. High institutional ownership also reduces the informativeness of earnings for firms with income smoothing and supports the institutional investorsâ opportunism hypothesis. Yet, this result is prominent when the institutional ownership is held by the qualified foreign rather than local institutional investors. This study implements several diagnostic checks and demonstrates that the results are robust to various specifications.
