To gauge the extent to which our findings are sensitive to the inclusion of observations from
benchmark countries, we next eliminate firms from non-IFRS countries. The results remain
largely unchanged, regardless of whether we use two separate quarter-year fixed effects (Model
5) or within-country estimation (not tabulated). We obtain similar results when we limit the sample to EU firms only or when we drop (one-by-one) the three largest treatment countries in
the EU from the sample (i.e., the U.K., Germany, and France).