Public comments speculating on the impact on firms of the transition to A-IFRS
date back to at least 1997, when the Australian Federal Government released the
CLERP 1 discussion paper[1]. However, in recent times, the extent of public debate has
increased. For example, in early 2005, 25 submissions were made to the Parliamentary
Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services (hereafter the Committee)
inquiry into Australian accounting standards detailing different views on the effects of
A-IFRS. A common theme in much of the recent comment is that firm size is an
important discriminatory variable. In the present paper, we measure size by total
assets at financial year end.