Reflections on the 20-Year Anniversary of Worldwide IFRS Adoption

Abstract

At the Ninth International Conference of the Journal of International Accounting Research, Editor Steve Lin organized a plenary session titled “20 Years of IFRS Research” to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the worldwide adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). During the session, each panelist presented their views on what we have learned from researching IFRS for the past 20 years and where we should go from here. This article presents a short essay from each panelist summarizing their comments, as well as related issues that were not fully explored at the conference.

Enforcement of Financial Reporting Regulation: Insights From New Data

“…Prior literature also stresses that these benefits critically depend on the country's public enforcement system to back up IFRS adoption (e.g., Leuz and Wysocki, 2016;Becker et al, 2021). However, this literature often recognizes the need to better characterize variation in enforcement efforts and makes a call to collect more data (e.g., De George et al, 2016;Cascino et al, 2023). Responding to this call, this paper presents new panel data on IFRS enforcement in the European Union (EU).…”

Transitioning to an IFRS-Based Accounting System: Longitudinal Insights from Practitioners in Portugal

“…[serving] the public interest by fostering trust, growth and long-term financial stability in the global economy" [7], extant research fails to draw consistent results on whether accounting harmonization is actually beneficial [8,9], and thereby on its contribution to the goal of sustainable development [10][11][12][13][14]. Rather, an emergent consensus seems to be that the effects of IFRS adoption are highly dependent on the underlying institutional context [12,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. Furthermore, while IFRS were planned to tackle primarily the needs of listed companies, a large (and growing) number of countries decided their unlisted companies had to adopt IFRS or IFRS-based accounting systems.…”