Banks, financial statement users, and accounting standard setters have long disagreed on the informativeness of banks’ statements of cash flows (SCFs) and there is a lack of relevant evidence in the literature. This paper examines the informativeness of the SCFs of U.S. commercial banks in two settings where SCFs are purported to be useful. The first analysis tests the incremental value relevance of banks’ SCFs beyond income statements and balance sheets and compares bank's SCFs with those of industrial firms. We find that banks’ SCFs have limited incremental value relevance, and are much less value relevant than industrial firms’ SCFs. The second analysis examines and finds no distress-predictive power of banks’ SCFs, especially in the presence of standard distress predictors. Overall, our results are consistent with the view that banks’ SCFs have limited informativeness.

长期以来，银行，财务报表使用者和会计准则制定者不同意银行现金流量表（SCF）的信息性，文献中也缺乏相关证据。本文研究了美国商业银行的SCF在两种据称有用的环境中的信息性。第一个分析测试了除利润表和资产负债表以外的银行SCF的增量价值相关性，并将银行的SCF与工业公司的SCF进行了比较。我们发现，银行的SCF具有有限的增量价值相关性，并且与工业企业的SCF相比，价值相关性要低得多。第二种分析检查并没有发现银行的SCF的遇险预测能力，尤其是在存在标准遇险预测因子的情况下。全面的，