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This paper examines whether the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Brazil in 2010 has improved the value relevance of accounting information, information content of earnings, financial analyst forecasting activities, and liquidity. We examine the variables in the pre‐IFRS mandatory adoption sample period, considered herein as 2008 to 2009, and the post‐IFRS adoption period of 2011 to 2012. We provide evidence demonstrating improvement in value relevance of earnings and number of analysts following the firms in the period after IFRS adoption, but we do not find improvements in information content of earnings, accuracy in analyst forecasting, and liquidity in the post‐adoption period. Our findings suggest a positive relationship between IFRS adoption and some areas of information quality in Brazil. By focusing on one important economy as it takes significant steps toward full convergence with IFRS, our study contributes to the growing literature concerning the impact of IFRS adoption around the world.

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The Brazilian Agrarian Reform Program has subsidized the settlement of over 425,000 destitute families on previously unproductive land in what has become a very effective vehicle for social inclusion and productivity growth for those settlers who reach the final stage of the process and receive definitive title to the land. Unfortunately, there is a large difference in efficiency and productivity between more and less successful settlements -fewer than 10% of relocated families have received title and over 25% of them have abandoned the property to which they were assigned. This paper presents a decision support methodology for increasing the efficiency of public investments in agrarian reform that includes a data envelopment analysis model and a mechanism for building consensus among the various constituencies of the agrarian reform process, who not infrequently have conflicting objectives. The OR model described herein uses principal component analysis and data envelopment analysis to identify the most important success factors for relocated families leading to an increase in the chance of both autonomous integration with the market economy and definitive entitlement by these displaced families as well as an increase in the predictability of future settlement success. The model was implemented successfully in Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, and was partially used in a pilot project for the countrywide agrarian reform accelerated consolidation program.Emancipac¸a˜o de Assentamentos Resultantes da Reforma Agra´ria -PAC) of the Brazilian Department of Agrarian Development. The methodology applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to measure settlement efficiency and to modify each settlement's modus operandi in an effort to shorten the length of time to achieve self-sufficiency.The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly describes the Brazilian agricultural sector and provides the context within which agrarian reform has been used as a policy instrument for wealth and income distribution as well as sustainable economic development. Section 3 describes the Brazilian agrarian reform program in detail and suggests some reasons for the proliferation of inefficient settlements. Section 4 offers a brief literature review of the DEA methodology including its use in rural applications and a description of different techniques for identifying the appropriate input and output variables. Section 5 describes the above mentioned decision-support methodology. Section 6 describes the application of this methodology in southern Brazil, including a description of the region, the characteristics of the settlements, and the various input and output variables used. Section 6 also presents results of this Rio Grande do Sul case study. The last section offers concluding remarks and comments on the methodology's possible role as an agrarian reform decision-support tool for the Brazilian government. L. Melgarejo et al. / Intl. PORGpond -qualitative variable describing the level of organi...