Salem, Faten Nasfi

Accounting information and market forecasts: the Tunisian case - 2020.


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To what extent does accounting information disclosed by listed companies enable reliable forecasts to be made concerning the evolution of their value? This is an important question for investors in their decision-making process. Ohlson (1995) and Feltham and Ohlson (1999) have developed a methodology to highlight the relevance of accounting figures. Ohlson’s model models a relationship between stock market value and financial and non-financial information. Its major contribution is summarised by integrating the value of equity, accounting results and “other information” into a same model. The objective of this paper is to test the relevance of “other information” variable in the Ohlson model on a sample of Tunisian listed companies covering the period 2012 to 2017. Thus, we study the additional informational content provided by the operating cash flow variable, compared to classical variables such as the result and the book value.Our results corroborate recent work that shows that the accounting result is the most relevant variable in the prediction of companies’ stock prices. The addition of the operating cash flow variable improves the explanatory power of the basic model, that combines earning and book value. These results obtained in an emerging financial market such as that of Tunisia provide interesting insights into accounting information.