Information Content of Other Comprehensive Income and Net Income : Evidence for Japanese Firms

The paper investigates information content of net income, other comprehensive income items, and pseudo comprehensive income for Japanese firms. The relative information content test demonstrates net income is one of the most dominant income measures, and the incremental information content test shows other comprehensive income items have significant information content. We find that stock market reactions to other comprehensive income items depend on the degree of firms' foreign dependency for foreign currency translation adjustments OCI item, and on the magnitude of the ratio of available-for-sale securities to equity for unrealized gains and losses from securities available-for-sale OCI item. We conclude other comprehensive income is useful information, while we cannot rank between comprehensive income and net income