This paper discusses and evaluates the usefulness and appropriateness of commonly used
earnings metrics. In a rational expectations equilibrium model, we study the information content
of earnings that can be biased by a manager who has market price, earnings, and smoothing
incentives. We define earnings quality as the reduction of the market’s uncertainty about the
firm’s terminal value due to the earnings report and compare this measure with value relevance,
persistence, predictability, smoothness, and accrual quality. The evaluation is based on their
ability to capture the effects of a variation of the manager’s incentives and information, and of
accounting risk. We find that each metric captures different effects, but some of them, including
value relevance and persistence, are closely related to our earnings quality measure.
Discretionary accruals are problematic as their behavior depends on specific circumstances.
These results provide insights into regulatory changes and guidance for selecting earnings quality
metrics in empirical tests of earnings quality.