How institutional factors and IFRS affect the value relevance of conservative and non-conservative banks

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the value relevance of accounting information before and after mandatory International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption as well as the ensuing relationship between conditional conservatism and value relevance. The authors probe the above relationship by considering a number of institutional parameters, such as the accounting origin of each European country, the degree of differentiation between domestic standards and IFRS, and the level of each country’s enforcement.

Design/methodology/approach The authors run panel data regressions for banks listed in 15 European countries using both the price and the return model. The authors partition the total sample in conservative and non-conservative banks – based on Khan and Watts (2009) – and in other institutional clusters based on prior highly acclaimed studies. Value relevance is then gauged by the corresponding adjusted R2.

Findings The results provide evidence that IFRS have reinforced the value relevance for both conservative and non-conservative banks. However, this result alters when controlling for institutional dimensions. Specifically, the value relevance of conservative banks is strengthened when operating in high enforcement, low differences or English-origin environments, while non-conservative banks display better goodness-of-fit in French-origin countries.

Research limitations/implications A survivorship bias might exist because the authors require three years of data before and three years after IFRS adoption for including a bank in the sample. More importantly, the post-IFRS period coincides with the burst of global financial crisis, which may have severely affected this bias. Furthermore, the C_Score methodology has been developed in a US-oriented context. Therefore, the validity of this measure might be different in countries with other institutional settings, such as week legal enforcement of high level of IFRS divergence.

Practical implications The authors stress the qualitative significance of conditional conservatism and suggest that accounting standards regulators redefine the qualitative substance of conditional conservatism vis-à-vis other accounting quality properties, such as value relevance. Also, both conditional conservatism and value relevance are directly linked to contracting, thus the findings are of value to the entities that are legally involved with banks. These findings are particularly important, especially when the authors take institutional parameters into consideration.

Originality/value Studies that investigate the relationship between value relevance and conditional conservatism in the banking sector are scarce. In the wake of IFRS adoption, the authors signify the role of institutional features as potential determinants in accounting quality changes, as well as in the relationship between value relevance and conditional conservatism.