statement, and all the other data we need for our tests from the first year after the
transition until the most recent financial statement, which was 2009 at the time of
the data collection. For the same companies, we also collect financial data under
local (ITA) GAAP in order to have the same number of observations before and
after IFRS adoption, symmetric around the transition. In our analysis we do not
consider the year of the transition because previous research finds particular
pervasive earnings management practices in that particular year (Capkun et al.,
2008).