Discussion of “Contracts valuation assessment noise and cross-border listing of equities on U.S. and U.K. stock markets”

The work of Nduzibu and Wallace (2002) is an ambitious attempt to provide evidence on whether cultural, institutional, economic, and contracting differences affect investors' evaluation of accounting numbers. Policy makers often assume that the quality of financial reports is determined by the quality of the accounting standards to which they conform. For example, one of SEC's criteria for acceptance of IAS was whether IAS's application resulted in transparency, full disclosure, and comparability. As Pownall and Schipper (1999, p. 262) point out, these are qualities of accounting reports rather than of standards themselves, and the SEC's wording presumes a causal link between the standards and accounting reports prepared under those standards. Taken to the extreme, the SEC's perspective implies that requiring foreign firms to present U.S. GAAP numbers is all that is needed to enable U.S. investors to assess foreign firms' financials on an equal footing with those of U.S. firms.