3.3.3. Governance quality
A growing body of literature provides evidence of the importance of countries’ institutional features
for reporting quality. Ball et al. (2000) find that firms from common law countries exhibit
more timely loss recognition. Leuz et al. (2003) provide evidence that earnings management
varies systematically across institutional clusters. That is, outsider economies with relatively
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dispersed ownership, strong investor protection, and large stock markets exhibit lower levels of
earnings management than insider countries. Recent studies also document that strict enforcement
mechanisms are necessary to benefit from IFRS adoption (Daske et al. 2008, 2013, Leuz 2010,
Barth et al. 2012). Thus, it is not clear that IFRS adoption per se increases accounting quality
and comparability (Kaya and Pillhofer 2013). In addition, several studies show that in countries
with low quality institutional governance, the benefits of IFRS adoption on foreign investment are
less pronounced (Ball et al. 2000, Hail et al. 2010). Beneish et al. (2012) find increased foreign
equity investment only for countries with high perceived governance quality prior to IFRS
adoption.
Accounting standards are part of a complex system of governance institutions that include
auditor training, auditing standards, enforcement, or the role of the press. Ramanna and Sletten
(2009) argue that in countries where the quality of local governance institutions is relatively
high, IFRS adoption is likely to be less attractive because institutions face high opportunity
and switching costs. These countries have a stable regulatory environment with existing rules
of law and a relatively high government effectiveness that is also likely to include accounting
standards for private firms. In contrast, in countries where local governance institutions are not
well developed, switching costs are likely to be low. Accordingly, we hypothesise:
H3: Countries with a relatively low quality of governance institutions are more likely to adopt IFRS
for SMEs.