Luzi Hail and Christian Leuz, ‘Capital market effects of mandatory IFRS reporting in the EU: empirical evidence’, referred to in Panel 5.6 in relation to the cost of capital, also look at the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on liquidity. The authors report that ‘the findings based on the price impact of trades and the frequency of zero-return days suggest improvements in market liquidity after IFRS reporting becomes mandatory. The results based on bid-ask spreads point in the same direction but are often statistically insignificant. We find that the liquidity results … are significant for all three liquidity proxies when we introduce firm-fixed effects’ ie, when they adjust for differences in firms’ circumstances. As noted in Panel 5.6, the authors advise ‘caution to attribute the observed effects solely to the adoption of IFRS itself’ as ‘many EU countries have changed their enforcement (and governance) regimes, which could play a role in the findings’. There is a substantial overlap between the evidence in this paper and that in Daske et al (2008), but the latter includes mandatory adopters from outside the EU and the two papers apply somewhat different tests.