Paper Title
International Financial Reporting Standards

Abstract
As financial markets integrate and business operations diversify, the need for adoption of common global accounting practices intensifies. Heightening this need further are inadequacies in reporting systems that sometimes undermine the credibility of published financial data. Incidences of inadequate reporting in turn have brought a call for research on how to align the content and presentation of corporate financial statements better with the interests of those statements� users.This paper outlines the arguments for a common set of accounting standards and the forces that have promoted adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Widespread use of IFRS since 2005 provides an opportunity for empirical investigation of the benefits of IFRS. I summarized the results of studies that are relevant for assessing the role of IFRS in both developing and developed capital markets. Also examine the effect of mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on financial statement comparability. To isolate the effects of changes in comparability, we examine changes to information asymmetry for firms domiciled in the UK. UK domestic standards that preceded IFRS adoption are considered very similar to IFRS; accordingly, we use the UK as a setting to isolate changes to the information environment relating to IFRS adoption that more likely to reflect changes in comparability versus information quality. If IFRS adoption improves financial statement comparability across firms, we predict this should reduce private information benefits. Empirical results confirm these predictions. Specifically, abnormal returns to two proxies for private information (insider purchases and analyst recommendation upgrades) are reduced following IFRS adoption. Similar results are obtained for subsamples that further isolate the reduction in private information as attributable to increases in comparability: firms having low amounts of reconciling items between UK GAAP and IFRS, and firms having ex ante high quality information environments. Together, the results are consistent with mandatory IFRS adoption leading to enhanced comparability. Lastly the mandatory adoption of IFRS by many countries worldwide fuels the Expectations that financial accounting information might become more comparable across Countries. This expectation is opposed to an alternative view that stresses the importance of incentives in shaping accounting information. We provide early evidence on this debate by investigating the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on the comparability of financial accounting information around the world. Using two comparability proxies based on De Franco et al. [2011], our results suggest that the overall comparability effect of mandatory IFRS adoption is marginal at best. To investigate the reasons for this finding, we first hand-collect data on IFRS compliance for a sample of German and Italian firms and find that firm-, region-, and country-level incentives systematically shape accounting compliance. We then use the identified compliance incentives to explain the variance in the comparability effect of mandatory IFRS adoption and find it to vary systematically with firm-level incentives, suggesting that only firms with high compliance incentives experience substantial increases in comparability. Research evidence consistently shows that IFRS benefits are more likely to be realized when IFRS application is supported by a framework that encompasses legal protections, competent professionals and adequate monitoring and enforcement.