A Study on Financial Reporting Standards and Accounting Quality- Evidence from China

According to institutional theorists, the forms and business models of corporation are mainly shaped by factors such as politics, regulations, social norms and cultures. This paper examines how the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and institutional environment influence the accounting quality, in response to the threat of political extraction in China. We took mainland China as an example instead in our study, following the accounting quality definition of Barth et al. [2], we found that the developments of Chinese government performance audit are conspicuously different by region; to reflect such differences, we elaborated our research by dividing mainland China into 31 categories (provinces or cities). We set 2003-2010 as the time horizon for this study. After testing the Regression model, our empirical research achieved two conclusions: 1) IFRS adoption in China should significantly improve the accounting quality, and 2) IFRS and institutional environment should synthetically influence the quality of accounting as well.