COMPLIANCE WITH IFRS REQUIRED DISCLOSURE AND ANALYSTS’ FORECAST ERRORS: EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL

Abstract

We analyze the relationship between analysts' earnings forecast errors and Brazilian listed firms’ compliance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) required disclosure. Through analysis of a panel data, we examine whether the variance in the Brazilian firms’ disclosure compliance levels in the Notes to Financial Statements for 2010 and 2012 affects analysts’ earnings forecast errors for 2011 and 2013, respectively, finding a significant negative relationship between these variables. By performing a compliance level analysis per firm, our study considers whether and to what extent firms effectively disclose as required by IFRS (as “IFRS serious adopters”), distinguishing them from firms that mere formally adopt IFRS (as “IFRS label adopters”), without effectively complying with it. Following other studies, we use four alternative models to measure the disclosure compliance level per firm, and we do not find significant improvement in the firms’ disclosure levels from 2010 to 2012, except if we use the most tolerant model. By this approach, our research contributes to clarify the impact of IFRS adoption on analysts’ forecast accuracy, as other studies that use only binary variables (analysts’ forecasts before and after IFRS adoption) have found contradictory results. Our findings confirm other studies on the international accounting convergence in other countries, emphasizing that compliance is at least as important as the simply formal IFRS adoption. This corroborates the relevance of enforcement mechanisms to induce firms to better comply with IFRS, thus to better attain the economic benefits expected from its adoption.