TY - JOUR AB - Financial analysis at international level has to overcome a lot of obstacles that increase the uncertainty which the financial analyst is used to handling. It is commonly argued by accounting regulators, academics, and so on, that different accounting standards are one of these handicaps. For this reason European listed companies will be required in year 2005 to elaborate consolidated financial statements according to International Accounting Standards. Will it be a solution for the handicaps that face financial analysts? The objective of this study is to see how accounting diversity can be resolved and what are the conclusions of financial analysts in capital markets. The prior hypotheses will be: first, that accounting diversity is not what introduces the most important uncertainty in the international financial analysis, and second, that accounting diversity is avoided instead of being corrected. It is evidenced that the most important factors of diversity are strategies of the company and that analysts try to reduce the impact of accounting diversity, for example, using less biased ratios such as Enterprise Value/EBITDA. VL - 16 IS - 3 SN - 0955-534X DO - 10.1108/09555340410536217 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/09555340410536217 AU - Martínez Conesa Isabel AU - Ortiz Martínez Esther PY - 2004 Y1 - 2004/01/01 TI - International financial analysis and the handicap of accounting diversity T2 - European Business Review PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 272 EP - 291 Y2 - 2024/04/18 ER -