This study examines the impact of accounting comparability on financial reporting quality and the extent to which financial statement users understand the implications of firms’ accruals. We predict that comparability improves the information environment, which not only enhances the ability of managers to estimate accruals more accurately and signal their private information, but also improves investors’ comprehension of accruals. Utilizing restatements, the mapping of accruals into cash flows, earnings persistence, and audit fees as measures of financial reporting quality, we find that prior-period comparability is associated with higher financial reporting quality. We also provide evidence that comparability is positively associated with managerial forecast accuracy and precision, consistent with comparability improving the ability of managers to predict future firm performance. Furthermore, we find that when prior-period comparability is higher, current period discretionary accruals are less positively correlated with contemporaneous returns and less negatively correlated with future returns, consistent with our prediction that comparability improves the pricing efficiency of accruals. Our results are robust to controlling for the endogeneity of accounting comparability and several different empirical model specifications. Overall, our findings suggest that enhanced accounting comparability is beneficial to both preparers and users of financial statements.

Introduction

Regulators argue that comparability increases accounting information’s usefulness and enables financial statement users (hereafter users) to identify the similarities and differences between economic phenomena (Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), 2010). The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) (1980) states that “investing and lending decisions…cannot be made rationally if comparative information is not available.” Financial statement analysis textbooks also stress the importance of comparability in judging a firm’s performance (e.g., Revsine, Collins, Johnson, & Mittelstaedt, 2011). Existing research on accounting comparability primarily focuses on its benefits to financial statement users such as financial analysts and creditors (e.g., De Franco, Kothari, & Verdi, 2011; Kim, Kraft, & Ryan, 2013). Very few studies have examined the implications of comparability for managers, an important party in the information production and dissemination process. Also, the implications of comparability for users have not been fully explored. To fill these gaps in the literature, we examine the impact of comparability on the quality of managers’ financial reporting and the extent to which investors understand the implications of firms’ accruals, given the impact of comparability on financial reporting quality.1 Following the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) (2010) and De Franco et al. (2011), we define comparability as the extent to which similar economic transactions are accounted for similarly, and dissimilar transactions are accounted for differently.