In our paper, Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine the underlying sources of the capital-market benefits around the introduction of mandatory IFRS reporting. Prior work finds significant capital market benefits and also shows that the effects around IFRS adoption are significantly stronger in countries with stricter and better functioning legal systems, and that they are stronger in the EU than in other regions of the world. We argue that this evidence is consistent with several interpretations and that it is still an open question to what extent these positive effects around mandatory IFRS adoption are indeed attributable to the switch to arguably better, more capital-market oriented, and globally harmonized accounting standards.

We focus on market liquidity and rely on within- and across-country variation in the timing of IFRS adoption and of other institutional changes to disentangle several possible explanations. Specifically, we explore whether (i) the switch from local GAAP to IFRS reporting played a primary role for the observed capital-market benefits; (ii) the introduction of IFRS had capital-market benefits, but only in countries with strong institutions and legal enforcement; or (iii) the switch to IFRS reporting itself had little or no effect and, instead, concurrent changes to countries’ institutions drive the observed capital-market benefits.

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