Empirical assessment of value relevance of accounting information and IFRS adoption among Nigerian listed insurance companies

Abstract

The study examined the value relevance of financial accounting information and IFRS adoption on the listed insurance companies in Nigeria as the main objective. But the study introduced earning per share on market share price and IFRS dummy variables into the Ohlson model in examining the value relevance of accounting information. Data were collected from a sample of 10 listed insurance firms for the period of 2009–2012 and 2016-2019 for pre-and post IFRS adoption respectively. Ordinary least square regression model was used in estimating the weight of the coefficient models of the study by using STATA software.The overall result shows that the adoption of IFRS has decreased the value relevance of accounting information on the listed insurance firms. However, the independent variables are EPS, DPS and BVS showed an increase after the adoption of IFRS with a positive relationship on market price per share. This study recommends that investors and policy makers should make more emphasis on DPS as a measure of accounting information as it has the great contributory value than other variables used in the study. The study has shed more light on the effect of value relevance of accounting information and IFRS adoption on listed insurance companies. The result further contributes individually to the current debate on the importance of adoption of IFRS literature by presenting both the pre and-post IFRS reporting framework on earnings of insurance companies in Nigeria. The study is limited for only a period of six years as the number of years examined for pre-and-post IFRSadoption. It is also limited to 10 sample insurance companies from the entirety of the population.