Prudential regulation of financial institutions relies on asset values measured based on accounting standards. This paper examines how this regulation affects financial institutions' incentives to use Level 2 versus Level 3 fair value reporting and how their endogenous choice affects systemic...

Accounting is sometimes seen just as a veil leaving the economic fundamentals unaffected. Indeed, in the context of completely frictionless markets, where assets trade in fully liquid markets and there are no problems of perverse incentives, accounting would be irrelevant since reliable market...

I review new empirical evidence from the recent financial crisis on the relation between financial reporting and financial stability. I draw the following conclusions: First, there is still no evidence that fair value accounting caused widespread fire sales of asset or contagion. Second, the...

This paper investigates whether U.S. banks' assets and liabilities, reported using Fair Value Accounting (FVA) under SFAS 157 Fair Value Measurement, are associated with information asymmetry among equity investors during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Using bid-ask spread as a proxy for...

We examine whether US banks' fair value net assets, measured according to the three-level hierarchy introduced in SFAS 157, are associated with information asymmetry during the 2008 financial crisis. Our results show that bid-ask spread, a proxy for information asymmetry, is positively...

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...

There is a popular belief that the confluence of bank capital rules and fair value accounting helped trigger the recent financial crisis. The claim is that questionable valuations of long term investments based on prices obtained from illiquid markets created a pro-cyclical effect whereby mark...

We investigate how investors price the fair value estimates of assets as required by Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157 (SFAS 157) since the financial crisis in 2008. We observe that Level 3 fair value estimates are typically priced lower than Level 1 and Level 2 fair value...

Fair value accounting has been argued as one contributing factor to the recent global financial crisis occurred from 2007 to 2008. However, recent empirical studies find no significant evidence for this role of fair value accounting. One reason for this inconsistency comes from the weaknesses of...