مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیرات استاندارد های حسابداری بر ساختار گزارش های مالی – اسپرینگر 2017

Regulators and the accounting community are concerned with how accounting standards should be designed or changed to achieve financial reporting objectives. Higher quality accounting standards are supposed to positively affect firms’ reporting quality and to be of greater value to users of financial statements. The German regulator implicitly acknowledged the growing influence of international accounting standards by enacting the German Accounting Law Modernization Act in 2009 in an attempt to make German GAAP align more closely with IFRS and to improve the information provided in German financial statements as a result. Specifically, modernizing national accounting law should result in a set of rules that is on par with international accounting standards, but more cost-effective and simpler to manage in practice (RegE BilMoG 2008). This study presents the main changes in the accounting rules and disclosure requirements of German accounting law and examines their effects on financial accounting properties. As medium-sized non-listed companies were a target of the German Accounting Law Modernization Act, this investigation focuses on the consolidated financial statements of private firms. However, to exclude the possibility that macroeconomic effects are driving our results, we include as a control group private firms that release their financial statements under IFRS. With no capital market data in our treatment group, measures of reporting properties represent accounting-based measures, which are calculated using only financial statement data. We employ several accounting-based financial accounting property measures that have previously been implemented in prior research and test whether adopting the German Accounting Law Modernization Act had an impact on these measures. All German firms were required to adopt the new accounting standards in the fiscal year 2010. However, the regulator allowed early adoption in 2009 on a voluntary basis. Our analysis is based on the magnitude of absolute discretionary accruals, the correlation between accruals and operating cash flow, the persistence of earnings, and the predictability of earnings as accounting-based financial reporting properties. The results of the main analysis, which uses a sample of German GAAP firms and German companies that report under IFRS, reveal an increase in discretionary accruals and no change in smoothing activities or in the persistence and the predictability of earnings. Certain significant differences in firm characteristics between the treated companies and the control companies raise concerns that our results are attributable to those differences. Hence, we employ a propensity score matching approach based on a probit regression to estimate the likelihood of releasing financial statements under German GAAP.