Prior Research
1. The Usefulness of Earnings and Cash Flows
Prior research has examined the informativeness of earnings and cash flows. Ball and Brown (1968) find a positive association between stock returns and earnings, which is higher than that between stock returns and operating cash flows. Board and Day (1989) conclude that earnings contain incremental information beyond fund flows and cash flows from operations. However, they do not find the existence of incremental information content of fund flows or cash flows beyond earnings. Dechow (1994) concludes that accruals play an important role in improving the ability of earnings to reflect firm performance. Earnings are more associated with stock returns than cash flows over short measurement intervals and over long operating cycles of firms. The superiority of earnings remains existed when the volatility of a firm’s working capital requirements and the volatility of investment and financing activities increase. This is because cash flows suffer from timing and matching problems causing them to be a noisy measure of a firm’s performance. In sum, prior research supports that earnings is a superior measure of firm performance. However, the value relevance literature provides the evidence of a decline in the value relevance of earnings. Francis and Schipper (1999) document a decrease in the relevance of earnings information, and an increase in the relevance of balance sheet information over time. These results are consistent with other research on the valuation of financial information (Collins et al.