This study focuses on the comparability of financial information. Comparability is one of the qualitative characteristics that are necessary to provide useful financial information. Specifically, I investigate how the concept of comparability in the prior literature is measured. I then present the trends for comparability over time for Japanese firms that use Japanese accounting standards.
First, in the review of the prior research, I divide the different ways to measure comparability into the input approach and the output approach, and discuss the features of measures used in the literature. I then analyze the trends for the comparability using the measure developed by De Franco et al. (2010), which is the most frequently used measure in previous studies. As a result, it is shown that the comparability of corporate financial information is improving over time with the globalization of accounting standards.