Comparability of financial reports: A literature review of most recent studies

Abstract

Financial statement comparability has for a long time been one of the main points of interest of financial accounting research. Recent studies and particularly those that followed De Franco et al.'s (2011) influential paper were mostly focused on putting to use the results of the financial reporting process to measure the level of accounting comparability and thus the comparability of financial results between companies. This working paper makes a short survey of recent studies that measure comparability of financial statements. As such it describes and comments on four important studies that introduced measuring concept for this problem. Second part of the research deals with classification of recent different streams of literature in this field. In conclusion, It also sums up what has already been achieved in comparability research.