Accounting Regulation in the European Union

Welcome to the accompanying website of Accounting Regulation in the European Union. On this website, you will find regulations and institutional details relevant to accounting researchers for countries of the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK). We kindly ask that you cite the working paper if you use the information on this website in your research project. Currently, we have posted the anonymous version to preserve anonymity in the review process, but please return here later to obtain the full citation.

Purpose: The purpose of this website accompanying our paper is threefold:

• Lowering the cost for researchers, reviewers and editors to become acquainted with the rich regulatory setting of each country over time.
• Improving research designs by identifying events that may coincide with the regulatory event of interest. Of course, not every coinciding regulatory event is a confounding regulation. For example, the coinciding regulatory event may not affect the outcome of interest, or treatment and control firms may be affected equally.
• Providing researchers with insight into available research opportunities to address their research questions when using the EU or a particular EU country as a laboratory.

Content: For each country, the following information is provided:

• A graphical overview of the regulatory changes over time.
• A list of all regulatory changes including links to the respective official documents, EU regulations (if applicable), and a paper that discuss the respective change (if available). If official documents are not available, we refer to secondary sources. The papers mentioned ideally cover the respective country. However, in case of EU Directives and Regulations, the papers might mention the Directive and national transposition into another country if no more specific paper is available. For EU Directives, we included the official transposition deadline as reported by the European Commission, unless we found in the literature that a directive was implemented with delay.
• A graphical overview of the number of regulations 5 years around a respective year (-2,-1,0,+1,+2).
• A graphical overview of the number of different categories (FA, Tax, Audit, and Other) 5 years around a respective year (-2,-1,0,+1,+2).
• A list of journal publications that include the country’s name or variations thereof.
• A list of recent SSRN working paper that include the country’s name or variations thereof.

Topics: Regulatory changes are categorized into four different topical groups (color-coded).

• Financial Accounting (FA): Changes to the financial accounting system, which includes, a.o., changes in recognition and subsequent measurement of assets and liabilities as well as disclosure rules. Regulatory changes are mostly either due to EU Regulations and Directives, changes of the local GAAP system, or disclosure rules of the stock market regulators.
• Audit: Changes to audit regulations and audit oversight. Regulatory changes are mostly either due to EU Regulations and Directives, or changes to the audit system.
• Tax: Changes in taxation, such as major tax rate changes. Regulatory changes are typically local.
• Other: All regulatory changes that do not fall into the previously mentioned categories (e.g., corporate governance, Initial Public Offerings (IPO), mergers and acquisitions (M&A)).

Firms: Regulatory changes apply to a particular set of firms (shape-coded).

• All Firms: Changes that apply to all firms, albeit with varying size thresholds.
• Public Interest Entities (PIE): Changes that apply specifically to PIEs, which in most countries include public firms listed on EU-regulated markets, banks and insurance companies, and often large private firms. The definition of PIEs is country-level, and therefore may include any company that the country additionally classifies as such.
• Firms listed on EU-regulated markets (Public-EU): Changes that apply only to firms listed on EU-regulated markets.
• Firms listed on exchange-regulated markets (Public-Other): Changes that apply only to firms listed on exchange-regulated markets.

We furthermore provide the following information on this website:

• The information that is available in tabular format on the website can be downloaded in csv form here.
• We provide an extensive list of published accounting research papers using non-EU settings (other than the US), using the same methodology as described in our paper, so that other researchers may be able to provide a similar primer on accounting regulation in these countries.
• We additionally report the figures (see paper) for alternate time windows ranging from event-year only through 10 years here.