5.Empirical results
5.1 Descriptive statistics and correlations
Table2 presents the descriptive statistics of the sample variables for the whole period of investigation (2001-2008) as well as during the pre-IFRS period (2001-2004) and the post-IFRS period (2005-2008) for voluntary and mandatory IFRS adopters. The mean stock return presents an increase during the post-IFRS period to 24.7% compared to the pre-IFRS period which is negative (-13.8%) and the same stands for the mean closing stock price (5.135). The same is true for the voluntary adopters but the difference is not as large as for the mandatory adopters. Also the ratification of IFRS impacted on the estimation of income and the book value of equity since both variables present a significant decrease during the post-IFRS period for the mandatory adopter. However, mandatory adopters seem to report less accruals in the post-IFRS period (-0.034) compared to the pre-IFRS period (-0.031) suggesting that the adoption of IFRS mitigated the distance between net income and operating cash flows leaving managers little room for discretion on the reporting of total accruals. Also, voluntary adopters presented an even greater decrease in accruals after 2005. Finally, mandatory adopters during the post-IFRS period are less leveraged (2.27), have more growth opportunities (5.69) and generate more cash from their operating activities (0.102) as a percentage of total assets, compared with the pre-IFRS period. Nevertheless, their size presents an increase to 4.88 in the post-IFRS period compared to the pre-IFRS period (4.45), however this result can be attributed to the revaluation