A goal of the IASC and IASB is to develop an internationally acceptable set of high quality financial reporting standards. To achieve this goal, the IASC and IASB have issued principles-based standards, and taken steps to remove allowable accounting alternatives and to require accounting mea-surements that better reflect a firm’s economic position and performance (IASC [1989]). Limiting alternatives can increase accounting quality because doing so limits management’s opportunistic discretion in determining accounting amounts (Ashbaugh and Pincus [2001]). Accounting amounts that better reflect a firm’s underlying economics, resulting from either principles-based standards or required accounting measurements, can increase accounting quality because doing so provides investors with information to aid them in making investement decisions. These two sources of higher accounting quality are related in that, all else equal, limiting opportunistic discretion by managers increases the extent to which the accounting amounts reflect a firm’s underlying economics. Consistent with this line of reasoning, Ewert and Wagenhofer [2005] develop a rational expectations model that shows that accounting standards that limit opportunistic disretion result in accounting earnings that are more reflective of a firm’s underlying economics and, therefore, are of higher quality. Accounting quality could also increase because of changes in the financial reporting system contemporaneous with firms’ adoption of IAS, for example, more rigorous enforcement. Thus, we predict that accounting amounts resulting
from application of IAS are of higher quality than those resulting from application of domestic standards