Critics have blamed fair value accounting for amplifying the subprime crisis and for causing a financial meltdown. It has been alleged that fair value accounting has created a vicious circle of falling prices, thereby increasing the overall risk in the financial system. In this paper, I...

Do firm managers invest the savings from tax avoidance in positive net present value projects that enhance future profitability or divert them towards perquisite consumption, rent extraction, and value destroying projects? We indirectly investigate this question by testing whether tax avoidance...

Fair value accounting (FVA) has been blamed for amplifying the financial crisis of 2008-2009. We investigate investor and creditor reactions to policymaker deliberations, recommendations and decisions about FVA and impairment rules in the banking industry. If FVA was a key contributor to the...

We investigate the impact of recurring fair value versus amortized cost measurement for accounting recognition purposes on the timeliness of insurers' other-than-temporary (OTT) impairments of non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities (NAMBS) around the 2007–2009 financial crisis....

Estimating expected credit losses on banks' portfolios has long been difficult. The issue has become of increasing interest to academics and regulators, as the FASB and IASB consider new regulations for impairment of loans. This study develops a measure of the one-year-ahead expected rate of...

To date, there is mixed evidence on the implications of tax avoidance on firm value as measured by Tobin's q or stock price reactions. The take-away from prior literature is that increased opportunities for rent extraction associated with tax avoidance (e.g., in low governance firms), might...

Bank lending standards vary over time. Periods in which firms find it relatively easy to borrow are followed by periods in which banks scrutinize borrowers more and tighten lending. We predict that changes in lending standards affect the accounting conservatism of bank-dependent firms. Using (i)...

We investigate the relation between corporate performance and overall economic growth in the United States. In particular, we focus on the impact of the U.S. corporate tax regime on this relation. Exploiting time-series variation and a tax shock, we document that the relatively higher corporate...

One of the important limitations of the SRISK measure of systemic risk, proposed by Brownlees and Engle and Acharya, Engle and Richardson, is its reliance on stock market data without much validation against the institutions' fundamentals based on its financial statements. We propose a financial...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering the pros and cons of moving to semi-annual reporting from quarterly reporting at least for certain segments of the market. However, documenting causal evidence on the consequences of mandatory quarterly reporting has been difficult, due...