The Predictive Power of Comprehensive Income and its Individual Components Under IFRS

This study examines the predictive power of comprehensive income and its individual components within the homogenous institutional setting of German IFRS firms. The results could be relevant for the standard setters IASB and FASB and their joint project “Financial Statement Presentation”. We find no evidence that comprehensive income has a superior predictive power for future firm operating performance than net income. Further, we fail to find significant incremental predictive power of aggregated or individual components of other comprehensive income for subsequent period's firm operating performance. The actuarial gains and losses on defined benefit pension obligations even seem to merely add noise for the prediction of subsequent period's net income and of subsequent period's comprehensive income. In contrast, our analyses indicate that other comprehensive income components seem to have incremental predictive power beyond one period. Finally, we find that the predictive power of net income and comprehensive for future firm operating performance has deteriorated as a consequence of the IASB's recent initiatives and actions