Critics argue that the “fair value” provisions in U.S. accounting rules exacerbated the recent financial crisis by depleting banks' regulatory capital, which curtailed lending and triggered asset sales, leading to further economic turmoil. Defenders counter-argue that the role of fair value...

The paper analyses the effects of three sets of accounting rules for financial instruments - Old IAS before IAS 39 became effective, Current IAS or US GAAP, and the Full Fair Value (FFV) model proposed by the Joint Working Group (JWG) - on the financial statements of banks. We develop a...

In June 2022, the Federal Reserve started reducing the size of its balance sheet, which had expanded to just under $9 trillion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, whereas banks' reserves at the Federal Reserve have decreased, the investment of money market funds (MMFs) at the Federal...

This paper investigates what we can learn from the financial crisis about the link between accounting and financial stability. The picture that emerges ten years after the crisis is substantially different from the picture that dominated the accounting debate during and shortly after the crisis....

This paper examines whether and how the level of exposure to fair value accounting moderates the changes in the value relevance of equity book value and net income during a crisis period. Using a sample of European listed financial firms over 2005-2011, our analysis confirms prior literature...

Accounting is sometimes seen just as a veil leaving the economic fundamentals unaffected. Indeed, in the context of completely frictionless markets, where assets trade in fully liquid markets and there are no problems of perverse incentives, accounting would be irrelevant since reliable market...

There is a popular belief that the confluence of bank capital rules and fair value accounting helped trigger the recent financial crisis. The claim is that questionable valuations of long term investments based on prices obtained from illiquid markets created a pro-cyclical effect whereby mark...

We investigate how investors price the fair value estimates of assets as required by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157 (SFAS 157) since the financial crisis in 2008. We observe that Level 3 fair value estimates are typically priced lower than Level 1 and Level 2 fair value...