adopt IFRS for SMEs. The negative coefficient of TAXREVENUE confirms the concern by
national regulators about political costs that prevent adoption of IFRS for SMEs.
5.3.2. Additional governance quality proxies
In the main tests reported so far, we follow recent literature in accounting and rely on a variable
(GOVQUALITY) that captures typical dimensions of governance institutions in order to proxy
for the quality of governance structures. In additional tests, we replace GOVQUALITY with
alternative proxies that can help validate the hypothesis on governance quality.
Therefore, we repeat our main regression analysis from Table 6, including (1) a variable that
captures the ‘ease of access to loans’ (ACCESSLOANS), (2) a proxy measuring the ‘strength of