دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی اهمیت گزارش های مالی بالا یا کمتر از درآمد عملیاتی برای شرکت ها و سرمایه گذاران - اشپرینگر 2018

Abstract

We explore a unique regulatory change in China in 2007 that moves investment income in an income statement from below the line of operating income to above the line. We find that, post-regulatory change, firms report high investment income when core earnings (operating income excluding investment income) are low and vice versa. Investment income and core earnings exhibit a significantly negative correlation every year post regulation, in contrast to a significantly positive correlation beforehand. We also find that investors do not fully see through the change. Before the regulation, both core earnings and investment income are positively correlated with contemporaneous stock returns and uncorrelated with future stock returns, suggesting appropriate pricing of the information. However, afterward, the results on core earnings are similar to those in the pre-regulation period, but investment income is negatively correlated with future stock returns, implying that the stock market overreacts to the information in investment income in the contemporaneous year.

6 Conclusions

We explore a unique regulatory setting that, starting from 2007, requires that the line item of investment income appear above the line of operating income, in contrast to appearing below the line of operating income prior to 2007. We use this setting to investigate whether firms change corporate activities to manage investment income opportunistically in response to this regulation change, and we explore how investors value the information content of this line item when it is presented in a different place in the income statement. From the firm perspective, we find that investment income and core earnings exhibit a significantly negative correlation every year in the post-regulation period, in contrast to a significantly positive correlation in the pre-regulation period. Firms tend to report high (low) investment income when core earnings are low (high) to influence the amount of reported operating income in the post-regulation period, mostly through opportunistically selling securities or long-term equity investments. This opportunism is concentrated in the fourth quarter, in response to the earnings performance in the first three quarters. Besides investment income, firms also use non-operating income to manage earnings, especially in the post-regulation period.