Relevance versus Reliability Trade-off in Financial Reporting among Companies Listed at Visegrad Group Stock Exchanges

The objective of this study is to examine the relevance and reliability aspects of accounting with respect to earnings' usefulness which is measured as the association between earnings and share returns. Motivated by the lack of this research in emerging markets, this paper is focused on the companies listed on the stock exchanges in the Visegrad Group (V4) countries. Multiple regression analyses are used to establish links between accounting attributes on the sample of 64 listed firms for the time period between 2005 and 2017. This study shows that relevance is a more dominant accounting attribute than reliability. Companies listed in the V4 markets share this feature with companies listed in more mature markets. However, neither trade-off between relevance and reliability nor any trend in these accounting attributes was detected. The lack of these dynamics may be explained by different financial statements' information needs of users in the V4 countries compared to users operating in more mature markets.