This paper investigates the impact of accruals and cash flow components of earnings on the stock prices and whether the stock prices fully reflect information about future earnings contained in the accrual and cash flow components of current earnings. This is an interesting issue of narrow framing, an application of behavioral finance. We mainly follow Sloan (1996)’s methodology but adjust hypothesis settings to fit the real situation of stock market in Taiwan. We find that high earnings performance that is attributable to cash flow components is more likely to be sustained than high earnings performance that is attributable to accrual components.

This paper investigates the impact of accruals and cash flow components of earnings on the stock prices and whether the stock prices fully reflect information about future earnings contained in the accrual and cash flow components of current earnings. This is an interesting issue of narrow framing, an application of behavioral finance. We mainly follow Sloan (1996)’s methodology but adjust hypothesis settings to fit the real situation of stock market in Taiwan. We find that high earnings performance that is attributable to cash flow components is more likely to be sustained than high earnings performance that is attributable to accrual components.

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