By Sudhakar V. Balachandran, Sudershan Kuntluru, Hariom Manchiraju, Sumeet Rajput
Contemporary Accounting Research | November 2025
https://doi.org/10.1111/1911-3846.70013
Contemporary Accounting Research
Contemporary Accounting Research | November 2025
We examine whether earnings from parent-only financial statements are incrementally informative to those from consolidated financial statements. We use a unique mandate in India that requires firms to provide both consolidated and parent-level financial statements, since currently neither US GAAP nor IFRS mandates this level of disaggregation. While disaggregation provides additional information, it also imposes costs, raising the empirical question of whether its benefits outweigh the costs. Our analyses reveal that disaggregated quarterly earnings components inform investors, with investors placing more weight on parent-level unexpected earnings than on subsidiaries' unexpected earnings. We do not find evidence of mispricing associated with disaggregation; rather, the higher weight on the parent's earnings reflects higher persistence, consistent with semi-strong market efficiency. Moreover, parent earnings provide incremental informativeness, especially in the context of poor earnings quality and high mergers and acquisitions intensity. Our results endure when we examine annual parent- and subsidiary-level earnings, where available, in 98 countries around the world. Our results contribute to the literature on disaggregation in accounting and earnings informativeness in equity markets, offering insights that may influence regulatory considerations on the usefulness of financial statement disaggregation.
Prof. Hariom Manchiraju is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the Indian School of Business (ISB). His research examines the role of accounting information in capital markets, the economic consequences of regulation, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting, executive compensation, and corporate governance.
His work has been published in leading academic journals, including Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Accounting and Economics, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Review of Accounting Studies. He currently serves on the editorial review board of Contemporary Accounting Research and is the founding editor of Accounting Theory and Practice, a research journal focused on India and published by Elsevier.
At ISB, he teaches Financial Accounting and Financial Statement Analysis in the PGP program and also teaches in the PhD program. His doctoral students have been placed at leading business schools, including the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
Prof. Manchiraju holds a PhD and MBA from the State University of New York–Buffalo, a Master of Financial Management (MFM) from Sri Sathya Sai University, India, and a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce from Osmania University, India.
