臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.30 NO.2

79 NTU Management Review Vol. 30 No. 2 Aug. 2020 and U.S. GAAP for a sample of German firms. Likewise, Mestelman et al. (2015) conclude that removing the reconciliation requirement does not significantly affect the value relevance of accounting data for non-U.S. firms adopting IFRS relative to U.S. GAAP. These findings provide consistent evidence that market participants see no differences in financial statements using the two standards. The third group of studies explicitly examines whether IFRS results are comparable to those reported under U.S. GAAP, based on the notion that accounting quality is determined by the market forces and institutional factors that affect the incentives for financial reporting. Using a sample of firms in 27 countries that adopt IFRS and a sample of U.S. firms matched on size and industry, Barth et al. (2012) document that U.S. firms’ financial statements exhibit greater value relevance than those of IFRS firms. Using a sample of German firms that switch from U.S. GAAP to IFRS, Lin et al. (2012) find that IFRS financial statements generally show more earnings management, less timely loss recognition, and less value relevance compared to those prepared under U.S. GAAP. These two studies provide consistent evidence that U.S. GAAP produces higher quality of financial information than IFRS. However, Lin et al. (2012) findings may not offer direct implications regarding the comparability of IFRS and U.S. GAAP, because their sample firms may not be representative of listed firms in the United States. Recent studies on the elimination of the U.S. GAAP reconciliation requirement provide mixed evidence that permitting IFRS reporting in the United States has significant capital-market effects. Jiang, Petroni, and Wang (2010), for example, find no evidence that the elimination changed the stock market response to the release of 20-Fs by firms adopting IFRS. Also, Kim, Li, and Li (2012) provide no evidence that IFRS firms experience a greater change in market liquidity or the probability of informed trading in the year after the regulatory change, relative to non-IFRS firms. In addition, Kim, et al. (2012) find no evidence that the regulatory change has a significant impact on cost of equity, analysts’ forecast error, bias and dispersion, institutional ownership, or stock price efficiency and synchronicity, implying that there is no informational loss or greater information asymmetry as a result of the regulatory change. The findings in Kim et al. (2012), however, are inconsistent with Han and He (2013), who documents significant increases in non-U.S. firms’ cost of equity after permitting IFRS reporting. Moreover, Hansen et al. (2014) document that IFRS filers with stronger incentives to provide informative disclosures significantly increase the information content of their earnings after the reconciliation elimination. Chen and Khurana (2015) find that firms already