Comprehensive Income: which potential effects on firms’ performance evaluation and users’ decision process?

Journal title FINANCIAL REPORTING
Author/s Pier Luigi Marchini, Carlotta D'Este
Publishing Year 2016 Issue 2015/2
Language English Pages 40 P. 55-94 File size 371 KB
DOI 10.3280/FR2015-002003
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The reporting of comprehensive income is becoming increasingly important. After the introduction of Other Comprehensive Income (OCI) reporting, as required by the 2007 IAS 1-revised, the IASB is currently seeking inputs from investors on the usefulness of unrealized gains and losses and on the role of comprehensive income. This circumstance is of particular relevance in code law countries, as local pre-IFRS accounting models influence financial statement preparers and users. This study aims at investigating the role played by unrealized gains and losses reporting on users’ decision process, by examining the impact of OCI on the Italian listed companies RoE ratio and by surveying a sample of financial analysts, also content analysing their formal reports. The results show that the reporting of comprehensive income does not affect the financial statement users’ decision process, although it statistically affects Italian listed entities’ performance.

Keywords: Comprehensive income statement, users/investors, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), performance evaluation, analysts’ reaction

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Pier Luigi Marchini, Carlotta D'Este, Comprehensive Income: which potential effects on firms’ performance evaluation and users’ decision process? in "FINANCIAL REPORTING" 2/2015, pp 55-94, DOI: 10.3280/FR2015-002003