Earnings quality in private firms: The role of IFRS and firm-level reporting incentives

私营公司，即其股票未公开上市的公司，占世界上大多数经济体所有公司的90%以上。到目前为止，关于采用“国际财务报告准则”影响的现有经验文献几乎完全集中在上市公司。我们的目标是通过对采用《国际财务报告准则》对私营企业收益质量的影响进行实证分析来缩小这一差距。此外，我们将调查在采用国际财务报告准则后，公司层面的报告激励在决定收益质量方面的作用。为了探讨这些研究问题，我们将重点放在德国的情况上，有趣的是，在那里，相当多的私营公司最近采用了国际财务报告准则作为合并财务报表，但基本上没有人注意到这一点。在我们的实证分析中，我们将使用公认的盈余质量指标(例如，盈余管理、及时确认亏损)，并在不同的设计中使用回归技术，如公司内部分析和控制组分析。我们预计，我们的结果将为私人公司基本上鲜为人知的报告实践提供有用的见解。

Private firms, i.e. firms whose shares are not publicly listed, constitute more than 90% of all firms in most economies in the world. Existing empirical literature on the effects of IFRS adoption so far has almost exclusively focused on publicly listed firms. We aim to close this gap by providing an empirical analysis of the impact of IFRS adoption on the earnings quality of private firms. Further, we will investigate the role of firm-level reporting incentives in determining earnings quality upon the adoption of IFRS. To pursue these research questions we focus on the German setting where interestingly and yet largely unobserved a considerable number of private firms has recently adopted IFRS for consolidated financial statements. In our empirical analyses we will use well-accepted measures of earnings quality (e.g. for earnings management, timely loss recognition) and employ regression techniques in different designs like a within-firm analysis and a control group analysis. We expect our results to provide useful insights into the largely unknown reporting practices of private firms.