For the purposes of our primary empirical analysis , we reclassify the five categories of IFRS harmonization described above into three ordinal levels : 1 Non adopter 2 Partial adoption i.e.. countries with convergence project , countries allowing voluntary IFRS adoption , and countries requiring IFRS for some listed companies ; and 3 Full adoption the middle three categories into single level of “Partial adoption“ because it is difficult to objectively rank these categories. We denote our primary dependent variable, which is the three-level ordinal estimate for every country – year in the dataset , as Adoption