Impact of international financial reporting standards on the profit and equity of AIM listed companies in the UK

•This study examines the impact of change to IFRS on the profit and equity of AIM listed companies.•The pre- and post-IFRS regimes are examined with data from the financial statements under IFRS 1.•We find the IFRS based profit as higher than UK profit but the difference is smaller than large firms.•In contrast to existing evidence we only find a marginal effect of IFRS on equity of AIM companies.•We argue that barriers to harmonisation should be realised before changing accounting regulation.