What is the Best Measure of Financial Performance? Comprehensive Income versus Net Income: Evidence from Turkey

Based on the claim that comprehensive income is a better measure of financial performance than net income, International Accounting Standard No. 1 (IAS 1) requires that companies report comprehensive income in a primary financial statement. In this paper, we test the ability of comprehensive income and net income in terms of Performance measurement by comparing their association with stock returns, operating cash flows and market value of equity. Our results provide evidence on superiority of comprehensive income to net income in terms of performance measurement. This study finds that the claim of IAS 1 is supported in practice. We also examine which components improve comprehensive income’s ability to summarize firm performance. Our results indicate that only “changes in revaluation surplus adjustment” improves the association between comprehensive income and stock returns. This implies that there is no benefit in reporting the separate components of comprehensive income.