Prior research shows that firms generating earnings growth by improving profitability create shareholder value, while firms generating earnings growth through investment destroy value. This paper examines whether compensation committees consider this while determining CEO compensation. We first confirm prior results that growth from increased profitability is perceived by markets to add value while growth from investment does not. While growth from increased profitability is positively associated with compensation, so is growth from investment. The presence of institutional ownership increases the weight on growth from increased profitability, but does not reduce the weight on growth from investment. Further, value-oriented institutional ownership increases the sensitivity of compensation growth to growth from increased profitability and reduces the sensitivity to growth from investment. Contrarily, growth-oriented institutional ownership increases the sensitivity of compensation growth to growth from investment. Our results highlight the importance of understanding the nature of earnings growth in determining executive compensation.

Abstract We examine whether earnings from parent‐only financial statements are incrementally informative to those from consolidated financial statements. We use a unique mandate in India that requires firms to provide both consolidated and parent‐level financial statements, since currently neither US GAAP nor IFRS mandates this level of disaggregation. While disaggregation provides additional information, it also imposes costs, raising the empirical question of whether its benefits outweigh the costs. Our analyses reveal that disaggregated quarterly earnings components inform investors, with investors placing more weight on parent‐level unexpected earnings than on subsidiaries' unexpected earnings. We do not find evidence of mispricing associated with disaggregation; rather, the higher weight on the parent's earnings reflects higher persistence, consistent with semi‐strong market efficiency. Moreover, parent earnings provide incremental informativeness, especially in the context of poor earnings quality and high mergers and acquisitions intensity. Our results endure when we examine annual parent‐ and subsidiary‐level earnings, where available, in 98 countries around the world. Our results contribute to the literature on disaggregation in accounting and earnings informativeness in equity markets, offering insights that may influence regulatory considerations on the usefulness of financial statement disaggregation.