Mandatory IFRS adoption: the trade-off between accrual-based and real earnings management
研究了强制采用IFRS后，企业是否用真实盈余管理替代应计盈余管理，发现严格执法国家的企业存在这种替代，尤其欧盟国家中公司治理强的企业更明显。
This paper examines whether firms substituted real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management after the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) became mandatory. Using a sample of 101,331 firm-year observations from 33 countries between 2000 and 2010, we show that IFRS adoption came with the unintended consequence of certain firms substituting real earnings management for accrual-based earnings management, especially among firms in countries with strict enforcement regimes. Furthermore, we document that the trade-off is confined to EU countries in which strong firm-level characteristics (i.e. the firm-level mechanism of control, the market’s level of scrutiny, and firm-specific incentives to provide transparency) are coupled with strong enforcement. We also show that IFRS had an effect in countries outside the EU, albeit at a different time. Overall, the results suggest that accounting regulators’ efforts to increase earnings quality might have had the unintended consequence of increasing real earnings management activities.