Information Asymmetry and Accounting Conservatism under IFRS Adoption

LaFond and Watts (2008) provide evidence that information asymmetry might be a determinant of accounting conservatism. One implication of their paper is that regulators trying to reduce information asymmetry by lowering the level of accounting conservatism might be wrong. However, there is a trend in moving away from conservative accounting. The typical example is IFRS adoption. Therefore, this paper studies information asymmetry and accounting conservatism under IFRS adoption. The results show that the level of accounting conservatism decreases after mandatory IFRS adoption, but the adoption of IFRS is likely to weaken the relationship between information asymmetry and accounting conservatism. Moreover, this paper investigates how the change of accounting conservatism under IFRS is related to the change in information environment. The finding shows that accounting conservatism increases information environment, supporting the idea that, by providing comparatively credible information, conservative accounting is beneficial to the information environment.