Revaluation of Non-Current Assets Under IAS-16: Possibility of Any Managerial Inducement: Evidence From a South Asian Economy

The revaluation of non-current assets under IAS-16 has now turned into a usual practice in Pakistan. The obvious reason is to give additional significant information to various stakeholders around an organization’s balance sheet. Besides, the management inducement behind this revaluation of assets may differ. The aim of this research is to study the essential management incentives that arise due to the upward revaluation of non-current assets of firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange for the period 2008–2017. Logistic regression and Mann Whitney U-test were used to analyze the data. It was hypothesized that firms take revaluation decisions to reduce the contracting cost, political cost, and the information asymmetry cost. It is concluded that there is a significant relationship between political cost (firm size) and some portion of information asymmetry cost (intensity non-current assets and stock dividend) with the dependent variable. Other variables like information asymmetry cost and growth were found to be insignificant and did not show any significant relationship with the revaluation of non-current assets. Contracting cost was not found to be significantly linked with upward revaluation. It is finally concluded that firms with a larger size, more intensity ratio, and less declaration of the stock dividend will have more chances to do a continual revaluation of non-current assets under IAS-16. This paper especially looks at whether revaluation of non-current assets is connected with the size of a firm and whether firms revalue their assets with an end goal to strengthen their financial position and prospects. Practically, in the light of this study, accounting regulatory bodies must define some preconditions for revaluation policy to stop the usage of creative and abusive reporting. Policymakers should encourage researchers to investigate the impact of revaluation policy on the financial performance of the companies.

Keywords: Information asymmetry, Leverage, Non-Current Assets, Political costs, Revaluation
JEL Classification: M20, M40, M41