We provide evidence that banks classify securities as held to maturity (HTM) rather than available for sale (AFS) when HTM classification provides preferred financial accounting and regulatory capital treatments, not because they have a distinct economically motivated intent and ability to hold...

Starting in March 2023, depositor runs quickly led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank. In the wake of higher interest rates, uninsured depositors of these banks had lost confidence in their business model of taking in deposits and investing the...

In the wake of the financial crisis, policymakers expressed the concern that banks’ use of the incurred loss model exacerbates their lending procyclicality by delaying the recognition of loan losses to recessions. Responding to this concern, the FASB issued Accounting Standards Update 2016-13,...

As of November 2016, SEC Regulation (“Reg”) AB II requires issuers of certain types of asset-backed securities (“ABS”) to disclose the credit-risk attributes of each asset in the underlying pool, a substantial expansion of prior disclosure requirements. We examine how ABS issuers’...

In this paper, I survey empirical research on the relevance of firms’ financial report information for the evaluation of their risk. I recommend that financial reporting policymakers require or encourage firms to enhance their risk reporting quality in four ways. First, firms should report...

Financial Reporting for Financial Instruments provides an integrated examination of the four most active areas of empirical accounting research on financial reporting for financial instruments: (1) banks' loan loss accruals, (2) fair value versus amortized cost accounting measurement bases, (3)...