Reporting Comprehensive Income: Reasons for Reporting Choices and Investor Reactions

This paper aims to investigate whether the reporting way of comprehensive income is influenced by some factors mentioned by the Positive Accounting Theory and whether the investors value their choice by looking at stock returns (measured in different ways) for firms in the S&P 350 Europe Index. The research results show that there is no significant association between the reporting choice of firms and the equity-based incentives, job security, volatility and leverage of the firms. Moreover, it was found that the price-earnings ratio and stock returns are associated with reporting choice, but in the opposite direction as expected. The results of a robustness test suggest that there is a significant association between the total compensation of the CEO and the volatility on one side and the reporting choice of firms on the other side. However, these results are not significant in the expected direction, but in the opposite direction.