We base our measure of earnings transparency on the explanatory power of the returns-earnings relation because the relation measures the extent to which earnings captures changes in firm value.The intuition is that the higher is the explanatory power,the more earnings captures changes in firm value.Although investors can obtain information about changes in firm value from earnings or from other sources,our measure reflects only the extent to which earnings and
change in earnings,and information correlated with earnings and change in earnings,explain returns