المضمون المعلوماتي للخسائر المحاسبية في التقارير المالية للشركات المساهمة العامة الأردنية

الملخص EN

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between accounting losses and stock market returns taking into consideration the length of the measurement window, the frequency of accounting losses, and the earnings reversal.

Furthermore the study attempts to examine whether book value and cash flows from operations have any incremental information content above the earnings figure.

Additionally, this study applies the contextual analysis by using four contextual variables which are growth opportunities, financial leverage, macroeconomic variables, and the listing period.

In order to examine the study hypotheses, univariate and multivariate regression models are used.

The sample of the study consists of 57 industrial and service companies that are listed on Amman Stock Exchange, during the period 1995-2007.

The results of the study show that Accounting losses have no information content therefore, the explanatory power of the returns-earnings relationship declines with the frequency of losses.

Furthermore, financial leverage, macroeconomic variables, and listing period do not affect the relationship between losses and stock market returns; however, growth opportunities do affect the returns-losses relationship.

On the other hand, book value has additional information content above that of accounting losses while cash flow from operations has no incremental information content over losses.

Finally, the results show that the explanatory power of the returns-losses relationship increases over long measurement windows, and the exsistance of a difference between the returns-earnings relationship and returns-losses relationship for the equal-extremity sample of observations.

The researchers recommend stock market participants to focus on the book value per share for loss companies since it has more information regarding the stock market price compared with accounting losses, also we recommend taking growth opportunities into consideration when taking investment decisions in companies that reported losses.