Value relevance of discretionary accruals under environmental uncertainty: the incidence of IFRS and the country's legal regime

Abstract

This paper studies whether IFRS adoption and the country's legal regime affect the value relevance of discretionary accruals under environmental uncertainty (measured by sales variability). The sample includes France and UK domiciles, providing a code/common law legal regime partition. We show that IFRS improve the value relevance of discretionary accruals to a larger extent in France than in the UK. Under local GAAP, discretionary accruals are more valued in the UK than in France while no significant difference is observed under IFRS, suggesting a marginal effect of the country%s legal regime. Under high uncertainty, results suggest that IFRS improve investors' ability to distinguish between earnings managed opportunistically and earnings management that provides a credible signal about future cash flows. Overall, IFRS would allow stock market participants to better assess properties of earnings management while reducing stock pricing discrepancies between code law and common law regimes.