The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters' push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...

The recent financial crisis has led to a major debate about fair-value accounting. Many critics have argued that fair-value accounting, often also called mark-to-market accounting, has significantly contributed to the financial crisis or, at least, exacerbated its severity. In this paper, we...

The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fair-value accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters' push to extend FVA into other areas. In this article, we highlight four important issues as an...

We analyze the role of a firm's debt maturity structure when refinancing its debt after a liquidity shock that reduces the firm's cash flow. Staggered debt diminishes the share of outstanding debt that a firm has to refinance at any given time, which should be most beneficial for highly levered...

We propose a novel role for accounting covenants in credit lines. Accounting covenants protect banks against severe aggregate liquidity shocks and firms against losing liquidity at will of banks. During aggregate liquidity shocks, banks need to ration liquidity, and covenants allow banks to...