This study presents the results of an experiment that examines how two underlying characteristics of pro forma earnings announcements, pro forma emphasis and the presence of a quantitative reconciliation, influence nonprofessional investors' and analysts' reliance on pro forma disclosures. The results indicate that the emphasis management places on pro forma earnings, not the mere presence of pro forma earnings, influences nonprofessional investors' judgments and decisions, but that this influence is mitigated by the presence of a quantitative reconciliation. Further analysis reveals that the influence of pro forma emphasis on nonprofessional investors' judgments and decisions seems to be the result of an unintentional cognitive effect as opposed to the perceived informativeness of the earnings figure emphasized by management. Analysts' judgments and decisions were also affected by the presence of reconciliation, but in the opposite direction to those of nonprofessional investors. Specifically, the presence of a quantitative reconciliation led analysts to view pro forma earnings as more reliable, increasing their reliance on the pro forma disclosure in judging the earnings performance of the firm.

This paper uses a new approach to examine whether income smoothing garbles earnings information or improves the informativeness of past and current earnings about future earnings and cash flows. We measure income smoothing by the negative correlation of a firm's change in discretionary accruals with its change in premanaged earnings. Using the approach of Collins et al. (1994), we find that the change in the current stock price of higher-smoothing firms contains more information about their future earnings than does the change in the stock price of lower-smoothing firms. This result is robust to decomposing earnings into cash flows and accruals and to controlling for firm size, growth, future earnings variability, private information search activities, and cross-sectional correlations.

Despite the classification of the cash flows on trading positions as operating under SFAS No. 102, trading is economically a hybrid operating/non-operating activity. Reflecting this hybrid nature, we hypothesize and find that the change in net trading assets has a less positive association with returns and future CFO than do the pure operating components of cash flows and accruals, and it has a more positive association with returns and future CFO than do the pure non-operating components of cash flows. Our paper is the first to propose and test hypotheses about the valuation implications of such hybrid cash flows and accruals.