Abstract

One of the initial assumptions of management accounting states that any changes in costs bear a relationship to the increase or decrease of the level of activity. However, this assumption has been argued after the issue of cost stickiness was proposed by Anderson et al. (2003), i.e. the amount of increase in costs due to an increase in the level of activity is much more than the amount of decrease in costs due to a decrease in the level of activity. Therefore the primary goal of this research is to investigate the issue of cost stickiness in selling, General and Administrative costs in TSE. Investigation the relationship between agency costs and Selling, General and Administrative costs stickiness is another goal of this research.
The results of this study are based on a sample of 145 listed companies in TSE for a seven-year period; during the years 1386 to 1392. These results suggest that while there is an increase of %1 in selling, General and Administrative costs for an increase of %1 in the volume of sales, there is a decrease of %0.32 in the Selling, General and Administrative costs for the same amount of decrease in the volume of sales. In this research, the relationship between agency costs and Selling, General and Administrative costs stickiness were also investigated. The results show that, there is no significant relationship between free cash flow, CEO tenure and directors' bonus (as variables for measuring agency costs) with Selling, General and Administrative costs stickiness.