These studies highlight the necessity to develop a tool to better predict future earnings and help develop various investment strategies.Many research papers have concentrated on the importance of earnings announcements and forecasts in the determination of investment decisions. While earlier research has only been able to show relatively low informativeness of earnings later studies were able to show the incremental information content of specific components of the financial statements [4][5][6][7]. For example, Finger et al. show that earnings provide information for future earnings and cash flows, and predict sign changes in the earnings per share using forecasting models developed from various income statement and balance sheet components [8][9][10]14]. Shroff et al. assess the predictive ability of a "composite" model, which forecasts as a function of current earnings and current security prices, against three univariate benchmarks: a random walk model, a random walk with drift model, and a first order autoregressive/moving average (ARIMA) model [11]. The findings indicate that the composite model obtains significantly lower forecast errors relative to the benchmark models. Sletten et al. find that earnings informativeness is higher in bad-news periods than in good-new periods [12]. Alam et al. were able to show that disaggregated earnings data were better able to predict next period's earnings in the banking industry [13].Ou et al. were the first researchers to focus on the usefulness of accounting information to predict the direction of movement of earnings relative to trend adjusted current earnings [10,14]. The study is important because it evaluates whether accounting information can consequently be used as the basis for profitable investment strategy. Given investors' reliance on earnings this could be a valuable tool for a profitable investment strategy. The authors found that financial statement analysis can provide a measure that is an indicator of future earnings which in turn is used as a successful investment strategy. However, the evidence from subsequent studies has been mixed [15][16][17][18][19].One objective of this study is to repeat the original Ou et al. study over a more recent time period and provide a viable tool for investment decisions. However, the main objective is to examine the methodology using, not the original COMPUSAT database, but the XBRL database. XBRL (extensible Business Reporting Language) is a freely available and global standard for exchanging business information. XBRL allows the expression of semantic meaning commonly required in business reporting. One use of XBRL is to define and exchange financial information, such as a financial statement [10,14].The SEC has created the XBRL US GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy. This taxonomy is a collection of accounting data concepts and rules that enables companies to present their financial reports electronically. The SEC's deployment was launched in 2008 in phases, and all public US GAAP companies were required to file the...

When Google went public with a dual-class capital structure in which shares owned by the founders confer greater voting rights than shares issued to public investors, its cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, promised to provide investors with high-quality information about the company. Using the words of Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, another dual-class firm, they promised shareholders, "We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you." Page, Brin, and Buffett definitely understood the importance of quality information to their investors, especially in dual-class structures. But do dual-class companies really provide investors with credible financial information? Contrary to the assumption of agency theory that dual-class firms are less transparent, we find empirically that these companies do provide credible information to their investors. Our results suggest that the quality of financial reports, as measured by their ability to predict change in future earnings, is higher for dual-class companies than for their single-class counterparts. These findings may be explained by the unique relations created in dual-class firms in which the founders provide investors with higher-quality information in exchange for superior voting rights. The article contributes to the heated debate about the transparency of *Dr. Dov Solomon is an Associate Professor of Law and head of the Commercial Law Department and the LL.M. program at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan Law School. He served as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and the University of Michigan Law School. This article has been accepted for presentation at the American Law and Economics Association (ALEA) 2020 annual meeting, the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) 2020 annual meeting, and the Accounting, Economics, and Law 2020 annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). The authors would like to thank Uri Benoliel, Lisa Bernstein, John Shahar Dillbary and Kobi Kastiel for their insightful comments and discussions. **Dr. Rimona Palas is head of the Accounting Department at the College of Law and Business. ***Dr. Amos Baranes is head of the Information System Program at the Peres Academic Center.

The current financial reporting systems are becoming obsolete due to the increasing sophistication of their users, the changing economic environment, and their inability to utilize current technology. This paper proposes an Extended Business Reporting App that will apply current technology, specifically app-based technology, to collect and integrate traditional variables with exogenous data. The app will customize presentation of the data based on user demands and allow a low-cost comparison among entities.

No abstract