The international accounting literature has identified a plethora of country attributes, each associated with levels or changes in reporting quality, the impact of IFRS adoption, and related economic outcomes. Our paper highlights the very high causal density of country attributes which makes it difficult to isolate their individual effects. We document very high cross-sectional correlations among 72 previously-identified country attributes and show that 4 underlying factors subsume individual country attributes in explaining across-country variation in reporting outcomes. Similar issues are observed for changes/shocks analyses. We conclude with implications for future international accounting research.

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International accounting,Financial reporting