Contribution à l'étude du degré de pertinence des différentes mesures du résultat : résultat net, opérationnel et comprehensive income

Accounting information and its underlying performance measures are increasingly regarded by authors as an efficient corporate governance mechanism. Accordingly, during the last decade, academics have extensively examined the value relevance of various summary income measures through their respective association with share return. Simultaneously, Anglo-Saxon standard setters have carried out major financial reporting standard projects related to listed firms' performance disclosure. These works raise the concern of the usefulness and relevance of an accounting income measure.Following this, this thesis investigates the relevance of various accounting income measures (namely operating, net and comprehensive income (CI)) by discussing their intrinsic economic and accounting properties. In a first part, we propose a modelling framework in order to ease the study of the income measure impact on a firm's financial performance. Then, in a second part, using a dataset made of companies listed on the five major EU financial markets on the pre-IFRS period 1992-2004, we first provide evidence that CI is less value-relevant than both the bottom-line and operating income figures in all the country samples under study and second find that increased transparency on reporting CI in financial statements as required by some local GAAPs (e.g. UK FRS3) does not warrant a stronger statistical association between firm share return and this summary income figure. These findings therefore strongly challenges the ideology underlying the IASB project on Performance Reporting and provides evidence against Beaver's (1981) and Hirst and Hopkins' (1998) psychology-based financial reporting theory.