An Empirical Analysis of Model Misspecification in Studies of Valuation of Financial Statement Disclosures

A number of studies have examined the correlation between financial statement disclosures and share prices to assess the informativeness of these disclosures. There are several potential econometric problems with analyses of this type, and the interpretations of the results depend critically on the type of econometric problem. For example, the results of these studies should not be used to answer accounting policy questions unless the effect of an omitted variable bias is likely to be minimal. Given potential interpretation problems, we argue that analysis of model misspecification should be performed to isolate the form of misspecification. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a series of tests to perform this task. We use these tests to assess the importance of misspecification in adaptations of Barth's (1994) investment securities valuation model and Beaver et al.'s (1989) model of loan loss valuation. We find compelling evidence of the importance of misspecification apart from measurement error (e.g., omitted variables) in the model of investment securities valuation, but find only weak evidence of any misspecification other than measurement error in the loan loss valuation model.