Although the impact of IFRS adoption on earnings quality is still an open issue for
public companies, at the best of our knowledge, it is even more a pending question for private
firms, as no study has directly investigated this issue so far. Francis et al. (2008) investigate
the determinants of voluntary adoption of IFRS by non-listed companies, analyzing
whether firm-specific incentives matter in their decision to shift to a different body of
accounting standards. However, they do not test whether the quality of accounting numbers
changes after the adoption of international GAAP. The same is true for a more recent article
by Matonti and Iuliano (2012), which focused on Italian private companies.