Value relevance delle risultanze di bilancio. Evidenza empirica per le emittenti ad alta capitalizzazione nel ‘dopo crisi’

The article focuses on the issue of value relevance of the main accounting results of businesses – primarily, net income and capital – investigating, in essence, how (and to what extent) they can reverberate on stock market values. Starting from the identification of the theoretical framework, namely the revisited Ohlson’s linear classical model, the study tests the value relevance principles in the actual "post-crisis" period by analyzing the results registered in the annual reports by the listed companies belonging to the high-cap Ftse Mib benchmark (covering nearly the 80% of the entire market capitalization), in consideration of the recent four-year (2011/2014) reported period. The original model has also been decomposed in order to enhance the role of accruals (non-monetary elements) deriving from the distance between earnings and cash flows from operations, ie between accrual-based and cash-based accounting. Such empirical verification about the possible impact of accounting information allows us to confirm the research hypothesis underlying the longitudinal model adopted (panel data – fixed effects), evidencing some up to date and interesting correlations / associations in point of value relevance for a considerable part of the Milan stock exchange market in the after-crisis (in sum: the proactive role of net assets and cash flows, rather than earnings; the negative impact of aggregate accruals as latent macro-indicator of possible earnings management).