Various calls have been made for the disclosure of value added data, and information content of it, has been examined in the accounting and finance literatures in recent decades. This study examines the relative and incremental information content of value added (including value added and cash value added) beyond traditional data (earnings and operating cash flow). Thus, the relationship between stock returns and changes in value added, cash value added, earnings and operating cash flow, was examined for production Companies at Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), in the period of 1998 through 2003. For testing the hypotheses of this research, regression method and OLS technique was used, for both of cross-sectional and pooled data.
Despite of Belkaoui et al's (1991-1999) and Firer's (2004) studies that showed value added data has greater information content than conventional data, this study’s results show that earnings has the highest information content in comparison to value added data and operating cash flow. In accordance to Belkaoui (1994), the value added data provides incremental information content beyond traditional data, and vice versa. Besides the results of this research is the same as some previous study about greater explanatory power of accruals versus cash flows such as Arabmazar (1995), Subramanyam (1996) and Haw et al (2001).
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