Fair Value Hierarchy in Financial Instruments Disclosure - Is There Transparency for Investors? Evidence from the Banking Industry

The debate on fair value accounting is still open although last 20 years have been spent in searching for solution by academician, practitioners and institutions. After a long and continuous discussion both on the basic concepts and the information level contained in fair value measurements and on the different solutions that is possible to adopt in mark to market measurements, IASB and FASB have recently issued new standards on fair value measurements applying some principles not only to financial instruments but also to property and other investments. To verify if the solutions adopted in these Standards really improve the disclosure level and the 'usefulness of data for investors', this paper tries to analyze the actual level of transparency and the 'usefulness' of the 'fair value hierarchy' (that for some aspects synthesized the Boards way of thinking referring to fair value) that has been already introduced for financial instruments by IFRS 7, Financial Instruments: Diclosure. The paper presents results of an empirical investigation on a sample of domestic and foreign listed banks who adopted fair value hierarchy in line with SFAS 157 and IFRS 7 recommendations. Research questions can be summarized as follows: (i) does fair value hierarchy improve transparency in financial instruments evaluation in banks annual report or it can be considered as a tool for earnings management?