Since 2010 a number of firms have voluntarily adopted mark-to-market (MTM) accounting for the actuarial gains and losses associated with their defined benefit pension plans. While pension accounting rules have allowed such a choice since 1986, only recently have firms begun to exercise that...

Many observers have argued that the fall in RMBS prices during the crisis was partly caused by fire sales. We provide an explanation for why financial institutions may have engaged in fire sales using a unique dataset of RMBS transactions for insurance companies. We show that risk-sensitive...

The principles characterizing the traditional revenue-expense approach to accounting have never been "invented". They are an institution that is the result of social evolution, not of human design. Therefore, the efforts to defend them against the balance sheet approach endorsed by...

Der Periodenerfolg im Kreditgeschäft hängt nicht nur von den Zinserträgen, sondern auch von der Bewertung der Kreditforderungen unter Berücksichtigung des Ausfallrisikos ab. Hier werden Wertberichtigungen für eingetretene Verluste, für erwartete Verluste, und solche zur Berücksichtigung...

Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions. A criticism of...

This paper investigates whether, and if so, to what extent, Level 3 fair values disclosed by European banks provide useful information to investors and are reflected in firm value changes. Using a unique sample of 416 hand-collected firm-year observations from European banks reporting under...

We directly test the reliability and relevance of fair values reported by listed private equity firms (LPEs), where the unit of account for the fair value measurement (FVM) is an investment stake in an individual investee company. FVMs are observable for multiple investment stakes, fair values...

The Bank for the Accounts of Companies Harmonized (BACH) is a free-of-charge database containing the aggregated accounting data of non-financial incorporated enterprises for, so far, 11 European countries. While the individual accounts feeding the database were originally prepared in line with...

Cash pooling is a bank service that allows corporates to externalise the intra-group cash management, and thus manage their global liquidity effectively with lower costs. Although there is little quantitative information on the significance of the phenomenon, cash pooling appears to have become...

The loan impairment rules recently introduced by IFRS 9 require banks to estimate their future credit losses by using forward-looking information. We use supervisory loan-level data from Germany to investigate how banks apply their reporting discretion and adjust their lending upon the...