Financial Accounting and Equity Markets

International Financial Reporting Standards: What are the Benefits?

Philip Brown*

Australian School of Business, The University of New South Wales and Business School, The University of Western Australia (M250), 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia

When countries have announced plans to adopt IFRS in lieu of the standards that had applied previously, they have referred to a number of benefits, mostly to do with equity markets. So it is not surprising that academics have looked to equity markets to assess the extent to which benefits may have materialised. The evidence they have gathered can fairly be characterised as mixed, partly because of differences in samples and the use of a wide range of proxies for the same underlying but ...