A major motivation for our study is the lack of evidence on the influencing factors ofcountries’ adoption of IFRS for SMEs forsingleaccounts of private firms. Private firms differfrom public listed firms in several ways. First, while we acknowledge that the group of non-pub-licly accountable entities is heterogeneous (Sellhorn and Gornik-Tomaszewski2006), the overallmajority of private firms with concentrated ownership are not organised as groups and thereforetend to prepare single accounts (unconsolidated accounts) rather than group accounts (consoli-dated accounts) (Nobes2010). The distinction in the set of accounts is important with respectto the legal origin of countries (La Portaet al.1998,2008, Goncharov and Werner2009). Forinstance, in many code law countries in Europe, single accounts of private firms have a clearfocus on regulatory purposes, such as dividend, insolvency, or tax issues (Ball and Shivakumar2005, Burgstahleret al.2006, Katz2006). This suggests that a switch to IFRS for SMEs asthe primary set of accounting standards is particularly costly in these countries, because changingaccounting rules would imply modifying tax and commercial laws (Nobes2010