An increasing number of countries have adopted International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Prior research indicates that IFRS increase the relevance of financial statements, but also increase opportunism in earnings management (EM). Despite this, no evidence is found in this study to demonstrate that the adoption of IFRS increases the use of EM by companies as a whole. Furthermore, the results indicate that the use of IFRS can enhance the neutrality of financial statements. However, these phenomena occur only in the case of firms with positive earnings. Therefore, if a firm faces earnings losses (ELOSS), the manager will often exhibit EM behaviour after implementing IFRS. Thus, when the firm has ELOSS and adopts IFRS, the situation that results will usually decrease the neutrality of financial statements. As for the management implications, these findings suggest that the government and regulator should implement more in-depth supervision to prevent the increased use of EM by managers following the adoption of IFRS.
To consider a firm's characteristics endogeneity and thereby determine its trend toward accounting conservatism, which in turn affects its financial distress, this study adopts the two-stage least squares approach. The first stage involves investigating the effect of the corporate characteristics on accounting conservatism. The empirical results indicate that financial distress and accounting conservatism exhibit a positive correlation. With respect to the non-financially distressed company, the accounting conservatism of the financially-distressed company is higher. The second phase in the logistic regression is to explore the relationship between the accounting conservatism trends and financial distress. The empirical results indicate that the trends and volatility of the accounting conservatism are significant and positively related to the financial distress, which may be due to the recognition of the company's annual loss on one occasion or the accountants' role in the function of exercising external oversight, thus increasing the company's accounting conservatism. According to the empirical results of this study we have found that the accounting conservatism trends of different company characteristics helps to determine the signs of financial distress. It is recommended that within the management of the company's operations the users of financial statements be aware of the trend and volatility of the accounting conservatism. This is of particular importance due to the probable development of the relevant decision-making processes of the company's stakeholders.
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