AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Since 2005, publicly traded European companies are required to prepare their consolidated financial statements in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This is the result of the so-called “IAS-Regulation” of the European Parliament and of the European Council (Regulation (EC) No. 1606/2002) which formulates two objectives directly related to financial reporting: (higher) comparability and transparency of financial statements. With regard to transparency, researchers often rely on proxies to measure the quality of financial statements. In this dissertation, I follow this approach and examine the quality of IFRS financial statements relying on different proxies, such as value relevance, the degree of earnings management, and disclosure quality. The four papers in this dissertation cover research questions related to the determinants and consequences of managerial discretion in the three most important components of financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement, and the notes. In summary, this dissertation answers important questions concerning the quality of accounting under IFRS which have remained unanswered – and in some cases even unasked – until now. Therefore, this dissertation has a material impact on the understanding of accounting quality under IFRS.