The mandatory adoption of IFRS and the disclosure quality of management discussion and analysis.

We examine whether IFRS affects the disclosure quality of Management Discussion and Analysis(MD&A). Specifically, we question whether information environment changed by mandatory adoption of IFRS affects the disclosure quality of MD&A, a type of voluntary disclosure. Our study differs from prior studies that mainly focused on whether IFRS affects capital market, information content of earnings, and discretionary report behavior of management. We find that IFRS mandatory adoption improves overall disclosure quality of MD&A in 2011 as compared to that in 2010, immediate prior year to IFRS mandatory adoption. Our results are robust after we control various factors related to IFRS early adoption. This empirical evidence supports that Korean listed corporations are likely to enhance MD&A disclosure quality in the process of adapting to changed information environment made by IFRS mandatory adoption. Our study contributes to disclosure literature as follows. First, we examine whether the mandatory adoption of IFRS affects the disclosure quality of MD&A, a type of voluntary disclosure, as compared to the prior studies mainly focused on quality of earnings, a type of mandatory disclosure. Second, our finding supports that the information environment changed by IFRS mandatory adoption has a positive influence on the disclosure quality of MD&A. Our finding has important implication for policy makers and regulatory agencies in understanding the importance of information environment. Third, given that MD&A related research is at an early stage in domestic academia, our study can act as a stepping stone for future study. Lastly, our finding not only raises the CEO recognition on MD&A containing analytical information about past and future performance of firms, but it can also drive manager to improve MD&A disclosure quality.