Empirical Evaluation Of The Overall Impact And By Industries Of Comprehensive Income On European Groups Listed On NYSE And NASDAQ

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to assess the Overall Impact, and by Industries, of Comprehensive Income on Net Income for a sampling of 136 European groups listed on NYSE and NASDAQ from 1999 to 2004. To this end we took as reference the consolidated information disclosed pursuant to SFAS 130 issued by FASB in the reconciliations to the US GAAP when they presented their Annual Reports to the SEC with form 20-F and Industry Classification Benchmark -ICB- (Dow Jones Indexes and FTSE). In order to contrast the corresponding hypotheses, a set of non-parametric tools were used, as the data was far from normality. The results of our paper, which are ground-breaking at an international level, show a statistically significant impact of Comprehensive Income on Net Income for the sample group in most of the years that were analyzed. However, when this impact is itemized by Industries we find that there are hardly any statistically significant differences between them, which allows us to affirm that by adopting Comprehensive Income, within the context that we have studied, we are witness to a phenomenon which, along general lines, affects corporate groups in a similar fashion, independently of the nature of the activities that they carry out.