MANDATORY ADOPTION OF IASB STANDARDS, INCOME SMOOTHING, AND REACTIONS OF THE JORDANIAN EMERGING ASE MARKET (Published)
Our paper aims to study the impact of the regulatory disclosure requirements enacted in 2004 on the income smoothing behaviour (a proxy for quality of financial reporting) and on firm valuation (measured by Topins’ q ratio) of Jordanian listed firms on Amman Stock Exchange (ASE). Our perception is that the new disclosure requirements of 2004 hold higher quality as a reporting system for the ASE market than did the one of 1998. A higher reporting quality is expected as the new disclosure requirements of 2004 had removed the conditions over adopting IASB-based standards that existed under the previous regulatory disclosure requirements along with bringing new structural and procedural changes. Previous literature suggested that IASB standards have been long perceived as a set of high quality reporting standards. Under such perceptions, we expect the reporting quality to increase, which in return, would impact the market valuation for listed firms. To perform our study, we selected a sample of 94 out of 133 publicly listed service and industrial Jordanian firms at the ASE. The sample consists of 58 industrial and 36 service listed firms. Our findings indicate a positive impact on both of the quality of reporting and market valuation of service firms with the new regulation of 2004 compared to a negative impact on the quality of reporting and a positive impact on market valuation of industrial firms.
Keywords: : IASB Standards, ASE Jordan, Emerging Markets, Income Smoothing, Reporting Quality, Tobin’s q Ratio