Contrary to claims that fair value accounting exacerbated banks' securities sales during the recent financial crisis, we present evidence that suggests – if anything – that the current impairment accounting rules served as a deterrent to selling. Specifically, because banks must provide...

The economics and management literature provides theoretical support for both leader and laggard firms to earn higher future operating returns. However, prior empirical research lacks a generalizable proxy to capture leader vs. laggard behavior, thus limiting prior findings to specific contexts....

Standard setters and many investors argue that loan fair values provide more useful information about credit losses than historical cost information while bankers and others generally disagree. We examine the ability of reported loan fair values to predict credit losses relative to the ability...

We examine the effect of headquarters' local religiosity on private bank outcomes. Religiosity is associated with lower risk-taking for public banks, but the unique features of private banks may result in a different effect for private banks. We find religiosity is associated with greater asset...