The Implementation of the IFRS 9 in Banking Industry

This study addreses a first post-implementation review of the IFRS 9. Precisely, I focus on short-term effects generated by the standard, i.e. a decline of retained earnings and other equity reserves mainly due to the implementaton of the expected losses-based provisionning model, and how did banks accomodate their accountng policy to mitigate those unfavorable effects. By using a sample of 56 EU publicly listed banks, I found banks have incentive to decrease (increase )their level of discrenationnary loanloss provisions when unfavorable impact on retained earnings is higher (lower), supporting the income smoothing hypothesis. In addition, obtained results do not verify the capital management hypothesis