IFRS Adoption in Germany - Empirical Evidence from 1998 to 2005

Differences between domestic GAAP and IFRS have always been of great interest as subjects for aca-demic research. We analyse 281 German companies adopting IFRS between 1998 and 2005. Our re-sults show significant equity increases; the adoption impact on income is not significant. We detect a significant industry-specific adoption effect and demonstrate significant differences between voluntary and mandatory adopters. Both effects have so far only been assumed by literature. Our standard-specific results show that only a few standards account for the differences. Finally we find that IAS 12 has an important impact for loss-making companies.