Is Comprehensive Income Value Relevant and Does Location Matter? A European Study

Abstract

This paper investigates the relative and the incremental value relevance of Comprehensive Income (CI) and Other Comprehensive Income (OCI) across European countries after the mandatory adoption of the IASB standards. This topic, which has already been analyzed in other countries, drew the attention of academics and practitioners in Europe after the issuance of IAS 1-revised, which requires entities to prepare a statement of comprehensive income (SOCI) in which both CI and OCI components are disclosed. The investigation of the value relevance of accounting amounts is important in order to evaluate their usefulness, because it highlights whether they reflect information investors use in making economic decisions. This study analyses a sample made of all the European listed entities of countries belonging to the EU at the date of issuance of EU Regulation 1606/2002. Our analysis involves a period from 2006 to 2011 and includes 16,511 firm-year observations. Our results show that Net Income (NI) is more value-relevant than CI, even though the total OCI of the period adds relevant information to those information already disclosed in other accounting items such as NI and Book Value (BV). In this regard, we found that the coefficient of the total OCI of the period is lower than that of NI, a result to be expected because of its transitory nature. Our findings also suggest that the requirement to issue a SOCI has not produced a significant change in the value relevance of both CI and the total OCI of the period leading to the conclusion that its location does not affect the value relevance of these items. Finally, we found significant differences in the incremental value relevance of the total OCI of the period across European countries, differences that seem to be caused by the countries’ characteristics, such as the source of funds (credit/equity and insider/outsider) and the legal systems.

Keywords: IAS 1; comprehensive income; value relevance; legal enforcement; investor protection

JEL Classification: M4