The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters' push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...

The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters’ push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

In the past twenty-five years, derivatives markets have grown exponentially. Large, modern derivatives markets increasingly enable investors to hold economic interests in corporations without owning voting rights, and vice versa. This leads to both empty voters — investors whose voting rights...

We analyze a comprehensive sample of more than 10,000 U.S. OTC stocks. We first show that the OTC market is a large, diverse, and dynamic trading environment with a rich set of regulatory and disclosure regimes, comprising venue rules and state laws beyond SEC regulation. We then exploit this...

Serafeim [2011] examines the determinants and economic consequences of embedded value (EV) reporting, a voluntary disclosure arrangement in the life insurance industry. He finds substantial reductions in bid-ask spreads for EV reporting firms, and links the occurrence of this disclosure practice...

This paper reviews recent advances from the institutional economics and accounting literatures to help build a nascent framework for ‘new institutional accounting' (NIA) research. The framework has five basic elements: (i) institutional structure (formal versus informal); (ii) level of...

Serafeim [2011] examines the determinants and economic consequences of embedded value (EV) reporting, a voluntary disclosure arrangement in the life insurance industry. He finds substantial reductions in bid-ask spreads for EV reporting firms, and links the occurrence of this disclosure practice...