This study examines the capital market effects of the SEC’s recent rule change to eliminate the 20-F reconciliation
requirement for U.S. cross-listed firms following IFRS. Specifically, we investigate the effects of the elimination on stock
market liquidity and the probability of informed trading (PIN). We find no evidence that IFRS-reporting firms experience a
significant change in market liquidity (as measured by zero returns, price impact, bid-ask spread, and trading costs) and
PIN in the year after the elimination, relative to a control group of cross-listed firms that do not use IFRS. We explore other
potential consequences of eliminating the 20-F reconciliation and find no evidence that the elimination has a significant
impact on cost of equity, analysts’ forecast error, bias and dispersion, institutional ownership, and stock price efficiency
and synchronicity.
While our main analysis focuses on the capital market consequences of eliminating the reconciliation requirement, we
also provide evidence on firms’ responses to the elimination. We find that none of the IFRS users continue to provide the
reconciliation in Form 20-Fs voluntarily after the elimination. Moreover, we compare the number of press releases before
and after the elimination and find that IFRS firms do not increase their disclosure frequency after the elimination.
To address the concern on whether our tests have sufficient statistical power given the relatively small sample size, we
conduct power analysis and find that our regressions do not suffer from significant Type II errors. In addition, finding
results that are consistent across different measures and robust to different model specifications increases the confidence
that our results are not caused by variable mis-measurement or model mis-specifiatoin. Specifically, we find consistent
results across four different measures of liquidity and PIN along with PIN parameters. Additional analyses of more than 10
measures of other capital market consequences also yield consistent results. To ensure a correct model specification, we
employ a difference-in-differences design, using cross-listed non-IFRS-reporting firms to control for contemporaneous