تأثیر فرهنگ بر محافظه کار بودن حسابداری در هنگام تصویب IFRS در اتحادیه اروپا The effect of culture on accounting conservatism during adoption of IFRS in the EU

1. Introduction Accounting conservatism is a fundamental principle that has always influenced accounting practices and financial statements. In the accounting literature, this concept has been widely discussed, in terms of its variation over time or across different legal and political regimes (Ball et al, 2008; Ball and Shivacumar 2005; Basu 1997; D’Arcy 2001; Gassen et al. 2006; Lara and Mora 2004; Pope and Walker 1999). Zeghal et al. (2012) introduced conservatism as an attribute of the quality of results and found that it decreased following the mandatory adoption of IFRS. Moreover, these authors found that a decrease in conservatism is more important for the group of countries whose local standards diverge significantly from international standards. In an effort to learn more about the consequences for accounting conservatism of adopting IFRS, it is appropriate to examine the potential impact of culture. Indeed, accounting literature has shown that culture is a key factor in explaining international differences. In their study of the differences in international standards, Ding et al. (2005) found that culture significantly explains divergence between local and international standards. Moreover, the authors underline that the legal system, which was often evoked in the accounting literature to explain accounting differences and international harmonization, turns out to be less explanatory than culture does. In this paper, our aim is to analyze the role of culture in explaining the consequences of IFRS adoption. More specifically, we are interested in analyzing the effect of culture on variation in accounting conservatism following the mandatory adoption of IFRS in the European Union. In fact, the application of these standards did not affect all countries in the same way (Gassen et al. 2006; Hung and Subramanyam 2007; Prather-Kinsey et al. 2008; Soderstrom and Sun 2007; Zeghal et al 2011; Zeghal et al. 2012). In a recent study, Borker (2013) proposed to determine a favorable cultural profile for IFRS. The author raised the issue of applying a set of standards known for their close resemblance to the Anglo-American model in regions with different cultures. The impact of culture on accounting systems and therefore on accounting principles seems important. At this stage, we already expect that culture influences accounting conservatism. In fact, Gray (1988) established a link between the cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede and accounting values. We believe that the results of this study will contribute to a better understanding of the consequences of IFRS application This makes it possible to capture certain biases in the accounting data of countries with different cultures, despite their adoption of IFRS. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a review of the relevant literature the objectives of the study and the research hypotheses. Section 3 describes the methodology. Section 4 reports and discusses the results. Finally, section 5 summarizes the findings and concludes the paper.