Empirical Study regarding the Influence of the Quality of Financial Information on the Value of Listed Companies

Abstract

Given the conditions of the actual economy, featured by intense changes, both structural and dimensional, the efficient estimation of the investment value contributes to the avoidance of possible side-slips of specific markets, with significant implications in the socio-economic sphere. Actual evaluation methods mostly introduce financial data in the analysis on which quality is depending the relevance of the informational output. The diversity of used models and even the random feature of their use in the evaluation process contribute to the enhancement of the uncertainties in this field. This weakness result both from the volume of processed information and especially from its quality, thus identifying the need to include some certifying elements of the financial information quality. This paper proposes that, by reporting to the features of the companies listed on the regulated section of Bucharest Stock Exchange, to analyze the impact of the reported financial information quality on the value of entities. Using data specific to a sample of 62 companies, on a time horizon defined by the 2010-2014 financial exercises, the study estimates the relevance, the faithful representation of economic facts and phenomena and the persistence of financial information. It also analyzes the influence of these features on the market value, debating, at the same time, the impact of non-financial factors, such as: the auditor’s reputation, the nature of the audit opinion or the specific of the used accounting standards. A series of well-known econometric models from the literature, such as Ohlson (1995), Jones (1991) and Dechow et al. (1995), have permitted the quantitative representation of the financial information features (value relevance, earnings management, persistence).