During recent years heightened standards for board audit committee membership has been imposed by the SEC, NYSE and others. Sarbanes-Oxley requires that the Audit Committee will be comprised solely of independent directors, and that the company must disclose whether at least one of the members...

We investigate the determinants of banks' responses to the United States Financial Accounting Standard Board's 2010 Exposure Draft that proposes fair value measurement for most financial instruments. Over 85 percent of the 2,971 comment letters were received from banks, with most bank-affiliated...

Regulatory capital guidelines allow for loan loss reserves to be added back as capital. The evidence in this paper suggests that the influence of loan loss reserves added back as regulatory capital (hereafter referred to as “add-backs”) on bank risk cannot be explained by either economic...

La Social Disclosure (SD) espressa in genere attraverso il bilancio sociale può a volte tradursi solo in una serie di adempimenti. In questa prospettiva, la ricerca intende verificare, con riferimento a 57 Banche di Credito Cooperativo (BCC) italiane, se l'intensità di SD sia effettivamente...

Fair value accounting (FVA) has been blamed for amplifying the financial crisis of 2008-2009. We investigate investor and creditor reactions to policymaker deliberations, recommendations and decisions about FVA and impairment rules in the banking industry. If FVA was a key contributor to the...

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...

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...

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...

We examine whether stress tests distort banks' risk‐taking decisions. We study a model in which a regulator may choose to rescue banks in the event of concurrent bank failures. Our analysis reveals a novel coordination role of stress tests. Disclosure of stress‐test results informs banks of...

Using a sample of publicly listed banks from 62 countries over the 1991-2017 period, we investigate the impact of capital on banks' cost of equity. Consistent with the theoretical prediction that more equity in the capital mix leads to a fall in firms' costs of equity, we find that better...