The Effect of Adopting International Financial Reporting Standards on the Financial Reporting Comparability: Meta-Analytic Evidence

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) were developed with the aim of increasing the comparability of financial reporting, enabling market participants to make better economic decisions and improving the efficiency of the capital market. But after more than a decade of research on the effects of adopting these standards, there is still no definite conclusion about the extent of achieving this goal, and experimental studies report contradictory results. In order to obtain objective evidence regarding the real effects of adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) based on the experience of countries that have adopted these standards, in this research, a comprehensive analysis of studies that examine the effects of adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on comparability Financial reporting has been done. Based on the analysis of 243 observations, with an independent sample of 2,544,582 company-years, meta-analysis and meta-regression results indicate that the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) generally has a positive and significant effect on the comparability of financial reporting. but the size of the effect of adopting these standards depends on several factors such as the method of mandatory or voluntary acceptance, the legal structure of the countries and the executive guarantee of accounting and auditing of the countries under review.