The Value Relevance of Alternative Earnings Measures: A Comparison of Pro Forma, GAAP, and I/B/E/S Earnings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores whether pro forma earnings, GAAP earnings, and I/B/E/S earnings are value relevant and, more important, which in comparative terms has the greatest value relevance. In addition to using actual pro forma measures contained in earnings press releases of Standard and Poor's (S&P) 500 firms, our design employs both traditional price and returns association models and incorporates both current and future measures of earnings. We find for the full period, 2000 through 2004, that all three earnings measures are value relevant. We further find that pro forma earnings are significantly more value relevant than Institutional Broker's Estimate System (I/B/E/S) earnings, which in turn are more value relevant than Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) earnings. These results are robust to several alternate model specifications as well as to controlling for measures of opportunistic reporting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".