The Prevalence and Validity of EBITDA as a Performance Measure

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Cette étude évalue l’EBITDA comme une mesure de performance et l’emploi de l’EBITDA dans la communication des bénéfices. Récemment, des régulateurs telle que la SEC s’élèvent contre l’utilisation « créative » des bénéfices pro forma comme l’EBITDA et demandent que son calcul soit plus standardisé. L’IASB adopte une position similaire quant à leur tolérance vis-à-vis de l’EBITDA. Notre étude évalue l’utilisation de l’EBITDA dans un échantillon de 15,895 rapports annuels and 51,758 annonces de bénéfices pour les entreprises qui font partie de la S&P 1 500 entre les années 2005 et 2016. On constate que 14.8% des entreprises souligne les mesures de l’EBITDA. Notre étude conclut que, même si l’EBITDA capture dans une certaine mesure la performance économique et peut être utile en tant que clause dans les contrats d’emprunt afin d’alléger le risque de crédit, les professionnels ne réalisent souvent pas les menaces et les inconvénients qu’impliquent l’utilisation unique ou excessive de l’EBITDA pour évaluer la performance des entreprises. L’EBITDA doit être analysée avec la prudence et le scepticisme nécessaires.

This study evaluates EBITDA as a financial performance measure and investigates the use of EBITDA in financial reporting. First, we take issue with recent comments that both the SEC and the IASB have levied against non-GAAP earnings numbers, and in particular EBITDA. While EBITDA allegedly provides an accurate reflection of the operations and abstracts from how assets are financed, we argue that (net) operating profit already provides this information without the necessity of making subjective adjustments. Also, our evidence suggests that EBITDA paints a rosy picture of the firm’s profitability and cash-generating ability. Next, using textual analysis, we investigate the prevalence of EBITDA in financial disclosures based on a large sample of 15,895 annual reports and 51,758 earnings releases from S&P 1500 firms between 2005 and 2016. We find that 14.8% of sample firms disclose and emphasize EBITDA numbers. EBITDA disclosures modestly increase over time and tend to be rather sticky in nature. In our cross-sectional analyses, we find that, consistent with our hypotheses, EBITDA-reporting firms are smaller, more leveraged, more capital-intensive, less profitable and have longer operating cycles than non-EBITDA reporting firms. They also exhibit higher forecast errors and a higher likelihood of missing the analyst forecast benchmark. Additional tests further underscore the opportunistic nature of EBITDA disclosures as we find that these firm characteristics are more strongly associated with the disclosure of adjusted EBITDA measures, and less strongly associated with the disclosure of EBITA and EBIT.