期刊名称：International Review of Management and Business Research
印刷版ISSN：2307-5953
电子版ISSN：2306-9007
出版年度：2014
卷号：3
期号：3Part 2
页码：1416-1427
出版社：Academy of IRMBR
摘要：The comparability of IFRS financial statements is frequently discussed in literature and numerous researches show that entities from different countries or with particular characteristics tend to use IFRS differently. However, hidden reserves, i.e. the discrepancy between the historical book values and their fair value counterparts, are usually not part of these investigations. Since we assume that hidden reserves can be a reliable measure of comparability, the purpose of this paper is to examine if specific factors of a company like size, country of origin or industry membership also indicate different odds to observe hidden reserves. Analysing 456 purchase price allocations, we do indeed find evidence for our aforementioned assumption. Our results show that the probability to observe hidden reserves under IFRS seems to be dependent on certain factors. For instance, our results clearly indicate that large companies show hidden reserves more frequently than small companies. We also find that entities from particular countries exhibit significantly higher odds to hold hidden reserves than others. In consequence, we assume that the comparability of financial statements under IFRS is still not achieved.
