We test our expectations on the initial comprehensive income reporting choice made
by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 firms during the 1998 to 2001 period. Consistent with
our hypotheses, firms that do not follow policymakers’ preferences for performance re-
porting are headed by CEOs with more powerful equity-based incentives and less job
security. 3 To assess the robustness of our results beyond (large) S&P 500 firms, we also
examine the initial comprehensive income reporting location choices of a random sample
of 181 firms not included in the S&P 500. Our inferences generalize to these smaller firms.
An additional analysis of the small set of S&P 500 firms that changed their comprehensive
income reporting location further supports our inferences: firms whose CEOs have increas-
ingly powerful equity incentives and decreasing job security are more likely to switch away
from performance reporting. This ‘‘change’’ analysis suggests our primary conclusions are
not attributable to some unidentified correlated omitted variable or uncontrolled firm-
specific effect.