As a milestone of international convergence for financial reporting, China formally announced the issuance of its new Chinese Accounting Standards on February 15, 2006. The new standards became effective from January 1, 2007 for all listed firms. Nearly all topics of IFRS are covered in the new standards, which are substantially in line with IFRS, except for a few modifications made for China’s unique environment. For simplicity hereafter, we refer to the new standards as “IFRS” and the old standards as “Chinese GAAP”. An essential characteristic differentiating IFRS as adopted in China from that adopted in the EU is the import of fair value (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 2006). Fair value accounting involves a fundamental change and a severe challenge for China’s accounting practices. Before mandatory IFRS adoption in 2007, accounting information in China was mainly based on historical cost instead of fair value. However, many countries in the EU had already applied fair value accounting even before their mandatory adoption of IFRS in 2005.1 He et al. (2012) find that fair value accounting has been associated with significant earnings management since mandatory IFRS adoption in China. Further evidence documents a significant reduction in accounting conservatism after IFRS adoption.2 However, these increases in earnings management and decreases in accounting conservatism can have opposite effects on the use of accounting performance for determining executive compensation. Earnings management can help in window-dressing or decorating managers’ effort and conservatism can provide biased accounting information or increase estimation error. On the one hand, if the board of directors can detect earnings management activities when evaluating accounting performance, then increases in earnings management associated with the adoption of IFRS should reduce the role of accounting performance in determining executive compensation. On the other hand, the reduction in accounting conservatism after IFRS adoption should increase the weight of accounting performance in determining executive compensation, because timely recognition of both good news and bad news makes accounting information a better and more natural indicator of managers’ effort. In this study, we aim to supply empirical evidence concerning these effects.