LA QUALITÀ DEL REDDITO MIGLIORA CON L’ADOZIONE DEGLI IAS/IFRS? IL CASO DELLE SOCIETÀ ITALIANE NON QUOTATE

Abstract

The need to achieve the financial reporting harmonization induced the European Union to enact the Regulation (EC) No. 1606/2002 that became effective, in Italy, by the legislative decree n. 38/2005. This allows some non-listed companies to prepare their separate financial statements in accordance with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). As these accounting principles are generally considered to be a high quality set of accounting standards, the aim of this paper is to analyze the difference, if any, in the quality of accounting information (i.e. earnings quality) following the voluntary adoption of these standars by a sample of Italian non-listed companies. The empirical
analysis covers 301 companies and the results do not show any improvement in earnings quality following the introduction of IAS/IFRS. These findings provide evidence that the adoption of a new set of accounting principles could be a necessary condition but not a sufficient one to improve the quality of earnings. It also depends on the institutional, economic and politic environment (Soderstrom e Sun, 2007) and on the actual incentives that firms have to switch to a new set of high-quality accounting standards (Christensen, Lee e Walker, 2008)


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