The IASB discussion paper, Preliminary Views on Financial Statement Presentation (IASB 2008), asks whether income should be aggregated and reported as a single comprehensive income figure, and how comprehensive income components should be reallocated. We extend prior empirical evidence by researching 16 European countries and by an extensive examination of impact metrics that include information, measurement, prediction, and conditional conservatism issues. A European setting that comprises substantial variation in markets, accounting rules, and business culture would, ceteris paribus, support differential reporting of comprehensive income. Results, however, consistently support the retention of operating net income as a general decision-relevant metric, with other comprehensive income reported individually and delineated by its unrealized nature. We found no compelling evidence that it should be reallocated into net income by function. Further, reported aggregated comprehensive income reverses the conservative attributes of income and has policy implications for providers of debt capital in a European setting. Results are robust to several firm-specific controls, nonlinearities, the impact of reporting incentives, and for early IFRS adopters.

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This paper examines whether the relevance of conventional (earnings focused) accounting information for valuation has declined in Australia over a recent period of 28 years. Motivation is provided by the anecdotal concerns of financial analysts, accounting regulators, and a cluster of US centric academic research papers that conclude that the relevance of financial accounting (and earnings in particular) has declined over time. After controlling for nonlinearities and stock price inefficiencies, we find that the value relevance of "core" accounting earnings has not declined. A possible exception is found for small stocks. We also observe that net book values are relatively less important in Australia when compared to the USA. Our results are informative for investors who require feedback on valuation issues and the International Accounting Standards Board regulators in any further moves towards a balance sheet focus. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2007 AFAANZ.

This paper re-examines and extends stock index futures pricing in Australia. The paper has two objectives. First, the paper provides a comprehensive examination of stock index futures pricing which is, as far as possible, free from method bias which has been problematic in previous studies. Second, the paper analyses the behaviour of the mispricing series in relation to a number of explanatory variables. The results indicate that a frequent but small mispricing series is prevalent and highly predictable. The series is related to time-to-expiry, which is consistent with the arbitrage position having an option component, and has a positive association with both volatility from the overnight US market and contemporaneous futures market volatility. Some institutional and time features are sample specific, whilst surprises in futures trading volume also have an impact on absolute mispricing. We conclude that the relationship between the markets is dynamic and likely to be driven by more complex nonlinear relationships.

The relation between stock returns, earnings and cashflows is of importance because it directly addresses the issue of whether accounting data provide value relevant information. The empirical evidence to date, however, has documented low explanatory power for earnings and inconclusive incremental information content for cashflows. This research re-evaluates the incremental information content debate using Australian data. Our research is motivated by: recent innovations in research design, including the specification of nonlinear functional relations between accounting variables and prices, and the fact that differences in firm size characteristics may influence the relative information content of the accounting variables. We observe that: (i) a nonlinear functional relation provides greater explanatory power for both earnings and cashflows; (ii) the results are consistent with more transitory earnings components for smaller firms; and (iii) contrary to received theory, cashflows add greater incremental explanatory power for large firms.