Advocates of fair value accounting believe that fair valuesprovide more relevant measures of assets, liabilities, andearnings than do historical costs. These advocates assertthat fair value accounting better reflects underlying economicvalues. The advantages of this method—and thecorresponding...

We present evidence on whether workers have social preferences by comparing workers’ productivityunder relative incentives, where individual effort imposes a negative externality on others,to their productivity under piece rates, where it does not. We find that the productivity of theaverage...