Mandatory Adoption of IFRS and Analysts’ Forecasts Information Properties

This study examines the properties of the information contained in analysts’ earnings forecasts for mandatory IFRS adopters in Europe for the period 2003-07. We find a significant increase in the precision of both public and private information after switching to IFRS, especially for forecasts pertaining to 2006 and later. However, we are unable to detect a change in the consensus among financial analysts after the mandatory adoption of IFRS. These results suggest that the higher percentage increase in the precision of common information is offset by a proportionate increase in the precision of private information such that consensus among analysts does not change. When exploring analyst-specific precision in more detail, we find that the analysts who are following firms in more than one European country experience the largest post-IFRS improvement in private information precision. These results hold after controlling for factors that are shown in prior research to be correlated with analysts’ information precision measures. Taken together, our results suggest that mandatory adoption of IFRS had a significant and positive effect on the information processing of financial analysts but this did not occur homogeneously across analysts.