On the Usefulness of Earnings and Earnings Research: Lessons and Directions from Two Decades of Empirical Research

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Abstract

Assessing the usefulness of earnings to investors was a major motivation for the most concerted research effort in accounting history-the tradition of returns/earnings studies launched by Ball and Brown [1968] and Beaver [1968]. That earnings usefulness was the principal issue investigated at the time was made clear at the outset by Ball and Brown; the term usefulness, and closely related phrases such as utility and interest to investors, appear no less than ten times in their brief introduction. The focus on usefulness is reinforced by Ball and Brown in their second section [1968, pp. 160-61]: Recent developments in capital theory provide justification for selecting the behavior of security prices as an operational test of usefulness. An impressive body of theory supports the proposition that capital markets are both efficient and unbiased in that if information is useful in forming capital asset prices, then the market will adjust asset prices to that information quickly....1