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Country-Specific Factors Related to Financial Reporting and the Value Relevance of Accounting Data

Ashiq Ali; Lee‐Seok Hwang
Journal of Accounting Research 2000 38(1), 1
Using financial accounting data from manufacturing firms in 16 countries for 1986-1995, we demonstrate that the value relevance of financial reports is lower for countries where the financial systems are bank-oriented rather than market-oriented; where private sector bodies are not involved in standard setting process; where accounting practices follow the Continental model as opposed to the British-American model; where tax rules have a greater influence on financial accounting measurements; and where spending on auditing services is relatively low. Results are robust to alternative measures of value relevance of financial accounting data, including measures based on earnings (using a regression and a hedge-portfolio approach), accruals, and earnings and book value of equity combined. We show that the extent to which earnings information is reflected in leading-period returns as compared to contemporaneous returns is greater for bank-oriented than for market-oriented countries. This feature potentially induces spurious associations between value relevance measures and financial system characteristics. Our results are robust to using value relevance measures adjusted for this confounding effect.

The Eyeballs Have It: Searching for the Value in Internet Stocks

Brett Trueman; M. H. Franco Wong; Xiao‐Jun Zhang
Journal of Accounting Research 2000 38, 137
In this paper we provide insights into the manner in which (relatively sparse) accounting information, along with measures of internet usage, are employed by the market in the valuation of internet firms. Consistent with those who claim that financial statement information is of very limited use in the valuation of internet stocks, we are unable to detect a significant positive association between bottom-line net income and our sample firms’ market prices; in fact, the association is actually negative. However, when we decompose net income into its components, we find gross profits to be positively and significantly associated with prices. In addition, both unique visitors and pageviews, as measures of internet usage, are found in most instances to provide incremental explanatory power (in some cases considerable) for stock prices. We also separately analyze the e-tailers, and the portal and content/community firms (the p/c firms) in our sample. For the e-tailers we find that bottom-line net income generally has a negative association with stock prices (as for the sample as a whole), while a positive and significant association exists for the p/c firms. In this respect, p/c firms’ shares behave more like those of non-internet companies. Further, we find for the p/c firms that the incremental explanatory power of pageviews and of unique visitors is approximately the same; in contrast, pageviews has much greater incremental explanatory power for the e-tailers than does unique visitors. This suggests that pages viewed per visitor is an especially important metric for the e-tailers, as compared to the p/c firms.