We use the EU stress tests and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis to study the consequences of supervisory disclosure of banks' sovereign risk exposures. We test the idea that a mandatory one-time disclosure induces an increase in voluntary disclosures about sovereign risk in the following...

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA) of 1991 was designed, among other things, to introduce risk-based deposit insurance, increase capital requirements, and improve banks' internal controls. Of particular interest in this study are the requirements for annual audit...

Following the Basel Committee's advocacy of value-at-risk (VaR) disclosure in external reports of financial institutions, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued Financial Reporting Release No. 48 to permit VaR disclosure as one of the most important disclosure approaches for...

Lenders can transfer credit risk by purchasing credit default swaps (CDS), but holding swaps can diminish their incentives to monitor borrowers. Contracting theory predicts that lenders demand conservatism, in particular asymmetric timeliness of loss recognition, to effectively monitor...

The German Commercial Code ('HGB') allows banks to build visible reserves for general banking risks according to section 340g HGB. These 'GBR reserves' may, in addition to their risk provisioning function, be used to enhance capital endowment, for internal financing, signaling or earnings...

We investigate the assertion that fair valuation of financial instruments exacerbated the 2008 financial crisis. We focus on the 4th quarter of 2008 following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Reserve Primary fund “breaking the buck” and other adverse events. Our central finding is that...

This paper examines the association between discretionary capital buffers, capital requirements, and risk for European banks. The discretionary buffers are banks' own buffers, or headroom: the difference between reported and required capital. I exploit capital requirements data that banks...

To mitigate counterparty risks, derivatives dealers and their frequent counterparties typically engage in bilateral master netting agreements (MNAs) that cover many derivatives with largely offsetting gross fair values. MNAs specify the close out and net settlement of the covered derivatives...

We investigate how overlapping activities of bank regulators and supervisors and bank auditors influence banks' internal control quality, auditor-client contracting (audit fees and audit effort), and financial statement reliability. Using material weaknesses in internal controls as a proxy for...

This paper provides early evidence on the effect of global regulation mandating a switch from loan loss provisioning (LLP) based on incurred credit losses (ICL) to LLP based on expected credit losses (ECL). Using a sample of systemically important banks from 74 countries, we find that ECL...