Christopher Nobes and Jordi Perramon, ‘Firm size and national profiles of IFRS policy choice’, look at the accounting choices for 2008 of 155 small publicly-traded companies in Australia, France, Germany, Spain and the UK and compare them with those of 155 large publicly-traded companies from the same countries. The authors find that small companies are more likely than large ones to continue to follow national accounting traditions under IFRS and that they are less worried about smoothing earnings. They comment that the paper ‘provides further evidence that harmonisation of accounting practice is still far from complete’ and that ‘it is less complete for smaller listed companies than for large ones’.
The inclusion of Australian companies does not appear to affect the overall findings.