Effects of Comprehensive-Income Characteristics on Nonprofessional Investors' Judgments: The Role of Financial-Statement Presentation Format

TLDR

SFAS 130 mandates reporting comprehensive income, but permits its presentation either in a statement of comprehensive income or a statement of stockholders’ equity. The study investigates how different presentation formats influence nonprofessional investors’ processing of comprehensive‑income volatility for unrealized gains on available‑for‑sale securities. An experiment was conducted to assess how format influences investors’ weighting of comprehensive‑income information. Results show that investors’ judgments of performance reflect comprehensive‑income volatility only when it appears in a statement of comprehensive income, indicating that format affects weighting rather than information acquisition or evaluation.

Abstract

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 130 requires companies to report comprehensive income in a primary financial statement, but allows its presentation in either a statement of comprehensive income or a statement of stockholders' equity (Financial Accounting Standards Board [FASB] 1997). In an experiment, we examine whether and how alternative presentation formats affect nonprofessional investors' processing of comprehensive-income information, specifically, information disclosing the volatility of unrealized gains on available-for-sale marketable securities. The results show that nonprofessional investors' judgments of corporate and management performance reflect the volatility of comprehensive income only when it is presented in a statement of comprehensive income. We provide evidence consistent with our psychology-based framework that these findings occur because format affects how nonprofessional investors weight comprehensive-income information and not whether they acquire this information or how they evaluate it.