This paper discusses empirical evidence on the economic consequences of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in the European Union (EU) and provides suggestions on how future research can add to our understanding of these effects. Based on the explicitly...

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union (EU) initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers,...

The purpose of this paper is to study whether or not the convergence towards a 'high quality' accounting standard will be the natural result. One of the purposes of IASB is to make high quality accounting standards because of the convergence. It seems that the best strategy for the convergence,...

This report provides a review of the academic literature relevant to the mandatory adoption of IFRS reporting for member countries of the European Union in 2005 and an empirical analysis of the associated capital-market effects. In the empirical analysis, we focus on the effects on firms' costs...

Accounting-based profit distribution restrictions have been a key issue of the EU's company law harmonisation efforts. At present, the concept of creditor protection via the maintenance of a minimum level of nominal capital is challenged in several respects: (i) With its recent rulings, the...

The European Union (EU) has been debating for several years whether to change from the legal capital regime as regulated under the Second Company Law Directive to a solvency test regime as applied in the US, for example. Based on an analysis of direct compliance costs and capital maintenance...

This study examines the impact on the comparability of earnings of two important events that occurred in 2005 in the Scandinavian region: the European Union-mandated adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the mergers between the three national exchanges of Denmark,...

In recent years, reporting under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) became mandatory in many countries. The capital-market effects around this change have been extensively studied, but their sources are not yet well understood. This study aims to distinguish between several...

This study examines the effects of secrecy and mandatory IFRS adoption on earnings quality proxied by signed abnormal accruals and earnings conservatism. Using 19,324 firm-years from 14 countries over the period 1998-2011, we find that firms in a high secrecy country tend to report higher...

I present a summary and analysis of a series of papers from this special issue of Accounting in Europe that examine the role and current status of IFRS in the completion of National Accounting Rules applicable to large ‘non‐listed in a regulated market' non‐financial undertakings trading...