Critics argue that the “fair value” provisions in U.S. accounting rules exacerbated the recent financial crisis by depleting banks' regulatory capital, which curtailed lending and triggered asset sales, leading to further economic turmoil. Defenders counter-argue that the role of fair value...

We investigate the role of bank regulatory reports in the information environments of banks. We find that: (1) Call Reports, but not FR Y-9Cs, elicit economically significant stock price and volume reactions when they are publicly released despite the fact that Call Reports usually follow...

Other comprehensive income (OCI) items are often considered to be transitory (Chambers et al. 2007; IASB 2013; CFA2014). In this paper we show that a significant portion of OCI, namely unrealized gains and losses (UGL) from available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities, is non-transitory: a negative...

We use the relaxation of interstate branching restrictions under the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act (IBBEA) to examine how increases in competition affect incumbents' voluntary disclosure choices. States implemented the IBBEA over several years and to varying degrees, allowing...

Accounting research has long claimed that banks time sales of available-for-sale securities to smooth earnings. We find that what the prior literature calls smoothing is more accurately characterized as boosting of low earnings. That is, the “smoothing” behavior is asymmetric, occurring at...

To encourage banks to accommodate distressed borrowers during the COVID-19 pandemic, regulators redacted loan modification activity from each bank’s public regulatory filings so that banks could modify loans free from capital market scrutiny. Congress also superseded U.S. GAAP by allowing...

The experience of the locally-created credit, and savings institution in Fandene, Senegal, is shared in this note. Its structure grew essentially out of local responses to the problems of drought, and diminished farm fertility throughout central Senegal, and, it is the product of historical...