Three Essays On The Effects Of The Simultaneous Adoption Of Ifrs International Financial Reporting Standards And Mad Market Abuse Directive In Europe

Download or read book Three Essays on the Effects of the Simultaneous Adoption of IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and MAD (Market Abuse Directive) in Europe written by Fatima Baalbaki Shibly and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While prior research on mandatory IFRS adoption fails to provide evidence of improvement in the quality of financial reporting (increased transparency and/or comparability), it provides almost unanimous evidence of beneficial capital-market impacts. Within the European Union (EU), mandatory IFRS adoption coincides with the adoption of the Market Abuse Directive (MAD). While the mandatory adoption of IFRS took place in 2005, MAD was passed between 2004 and 2007 depending on the EU country under consideration. Furthermore, both IFRS and MAD aim towards increased transparency, either by improving the quality of financial reporting (IFRS) or by prohibiting selective disclosures to enhance common information available to all market participants (MAD). Our first essay aims to disentangle the respective market impacts of MAD adoption and IFRS adoption in order to determine the specific effect of each regulation. Our evidence suggests that a significant part of the capital market effects usually attributed to IFRS comes, at least to some extent, from the contemporaneous adoption of the Market Abuse Directive. Our second essay focuses on the role of information environment. Investigating how information environment affects the market impacts of both MAD adoption and IFRS adoption is crucial to determine whether all firms benefit identically from these regulations. Using firm size and analyst following as proxies capturing firms' information environment, we provide evidence showing that small firms and firms with weak analyst following are those that benefit the most from the introduction of the IFRS mandate. In contrast, large firms and firms with high analyst coverage benefit the most from MAD adoption. Our third essay analyzes the role of enforcement. We find that the effectiveness of both IFRS and MAD is hampered by different enforcement levels across firms and countries. Moreover, the observed capital-market outcomes on one regulation differ if the effects of both regulations are not clearly dissociated. Thus, we caution researchers not to attribute capital-market outcomes primarily or solely to one regulation without taking into account the concomitant adoption of the other one.