Värderelevanseffekter av IFRS 16

Abstract

On January first 2019, the new standard IFRS 16 regarding leasing was implemented. This standard aims to provide a more faithful representation of a company's assets and liabilities and reduce the need for investors to make adjustments in the financial statements. Meanwhile, many companies are negative against these changes, as in their view the new standard will lead to negative economic consequences. We undertake a value-relevance study by using an adjusted model of the valuation framework developed by Ohlson (1995) to investigate whether investors and analysts, in the leasing-intensive industry retail, even before the implementation of IFRS 16 took operational leasing into account when valuating businesses. We measure changes in the incremental value relevance pre and post the implementation of IFRS 16 using financial data from companies in the retail sector during the fiscal years 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020. Our results suggest that the value relevance for leasing is unchanged while the value relevance for EBITDA has decreased, which however does not appear to be due to the introduction of IFRS 16 and investors seem to have taken operational leasing into consideration, even before the implementation of IFRS 16.