Adoption of IFRS in Brazil: Effects on Accounting Conservatism

Abstract

The objective in this study is to investigate the effect of the adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the degree of conditional conservatism in the financial statements of companies listed on BM&FBOVESPA. Considering that the convergence process with the international standards aims for the standardization of accounting information disclosure and the enhancement of its quality, the goal was to investigate the quality standards of the accounting information in Brazilian companies after the adoption of the IFRS in the phases characterized by the period 2008, when accounting pronouncements (CPC) 1 to 14 were adopted, and as from 2010, when the adoption of the full IFRS became compulsory. Therefore, a sample of financial statements was used from 320 companies listed on BM&FBOVESPA between 2000 and 2012. As a proxy of information quality, the attribute Conservatism was used, as proposed by Basu (1997) and Ball and Shivakumar (2005). The results did not evidence changes in the degree of conservatism in the statements analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]