The Convergence of IFRS and U.S. GAAP: Evidence from the SEC's Removal of Form 20-F Reconciliations

We use the SEC's 2007 decision that eliminates the reconciliation requirement for foreign listed private issuers (FPIs) reporting under IFRS as a natural experiment to examine whether IFRS and U.S. GAAP produce accounting information of comparable quality. We conduct statistical analyses using a sample of 563 firm-year observations of FPIs during the period 2002 through 2008 for a panel of 70 FPIs that report under IFRS as our treatment group and 46 FPIs that report under U.S. GAAP as our control group. Using a stock-valuation model and a difference-in-differences (DD) analysis of scaled residuals we examine whether the reconciliation values reported by IFRS FPIs prior to 2007 were value relevant and if the elimination of the reconciliation information in the post-intervention period (2007 and 2008) has adversely affected the information available to investors to make stock-valuation decisions. The results for the 2002 through 2006 period suggest that the reconciliation values for book value were value relevant. The DD analysis shows that while the residual-value model incorporating reconciliation information produced comparable scaled stock price residuals for IFRS and U.S. GAAP FPIs prior to 2007, the removal of the reconciliation information did not lead to statistically significant increases in scaled stock price residuals for IFRS and U.S. GAAP FPIs.