Characteristics of Performance Measures for External Reporting

Abstract The characteristics of the performance measures used in internal or external reports are becoming more and more important. Indeed, most companies disclose non-financial information to their stakeholders. The Standards Committee of the American Accounting Association (Maines et al., 2002) states that non-financial performance measures should be judged against the same criteria as financial performance measures, i.e. relevance, reliability and comparability. The purpose of this paper is to present the results from an empirical study conducted on the non-financial and the financial information disclosed by the 250 biggest French listed companies within their financial communication. It deals more specifically with the characteristics of relevance, reliability and comparability of this information. The design of this study is based on an exploratory survey conducted last year on the French CAC 40 (the 40 French biggest listed corporations on the Paris Stock Exchange).

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