Predictive Power and Value Relevance of Comprehensive Income Statement: an analysis of Brazilian companies listed on the BM&FBovespa

Abstract

The study aimed to analyze if the information about comprehensive income (CI) and its individual components have predictive power to determine the Operating Cash Flow of the subsequent period (OCFt+1) at the Brazilian capital market companies. The research methodology has used financial data collected from Economatica® and CVM databases. The sample selection was performed considering the availability of variables: OCFt+1 and share prices. The period analyzed comprehended the years 2012-2014. It were used quantitative valuation techniques, establishing two moments of study: the first moment by testing the hypothesis that CI has greater predictive power than Net Income (NI) for forecasting OCFt+1 (528 firms/years); and the second moment by testing the hypothesis that CI and its components have a value relevance at the Brazilian capital market (605 firms/years). The results suggest that the analysis of the consolidated CI individually would not be incremental for forecasting OCFt+1. However, an increase was observed in the predictive capacity for OCFt+1, with the inclusion of Other Comprehensive Income (OCI). Could not be verified, with aggregate disruption of the individual items of OCI, incremental capacity to determine the OCFt+1. It was observed that the Equity and NI have value relevance, but that is not confirmed to consolidated CI. Added to that, only the cash flow hedge was significant to explain the market value of the company, indicating there is informational benefit to stakeholders that employ the CI in their analysis.