Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

About a year ago (March 12, 2009) the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Entities held a hearing titled “Mark-to-Market Accounting: Practices and Implications.”  The Committee members directed several hours of fairly hostile questioning to FASB Chairman Bob Herz and SEC Chief Accountant Jim Kroeker.  If you have not seen [...] Read more > >

Mark Evans of Indiana University will lead our next roundtable discussion, Wednesday March 3rd, 11am ET).  Here is the abstract from his recent paper, written with Leslie Hodder and Pat Hopkins, exploring fair value in commercial banks: For a sample of commercial banks during 1994–2008, we find that accumulated fair value adjustments for investment securities are [...] Read more > >

Mark Evans, Leslie Hodder and Pat Hopkins just posted a paper on SSRN indicating some benefits to fair value accounting in financial institutions.  From the abstract: For a sample of commercial banks during 1994–2008, we find that accumulated fair value adjustments for investment securities are positively associated with realized income from investment securities in the following [...] Read more > >

Stephen Ryan (NYU) joins FASRI to talk about his recent research on the fair value option in the banking industry.  Stephen is one of the most respected accounting academics studying banking and financial instruments these days, so I expect people will have plenty of questions beyond the research study that will form the heart of [...] Read more > >

I was excited this past week to read that the IASB recently published a second exposure draft on a portion of IAS 37 Provisions, Contingent Liabilities, and Contingent Assets. I know, excitement might be too strong of a word, but I was looking forward to seeing whether the IASB’s decision on how to measure onerous [...] Read more > >

Typically at the start of every New Year, we spend time thinking about the prior year and all the interesting and exciting events that have happened. 2009 was certainly a banner year for accounting standard setting. As I was thinking back over all that happened and trying to determine what was the most surprising thing [...] Read more > >

* UPDATE: The archived video is shown above. Please note that the welcome screen is displayed for the first 11 minutes and 10 seconds. You’ll want to skip to 11:10 in the video to begin seeing the discussion. We just finished a great Roundtable with Jim Leisenring from the IASB. We will get the video online [...] Read more > >

Somehow I ended up on the mailing list of Risk.Net, which hails itself as “The world’s leading monthly magazine dedicated to the risk management and derivatives industries.”  In this week’s top story, headlined “Abuse of revised IFRS standards “inevitable” – IASB’s Leisenring“, Jim is quoted as expressing concern about using management intent to determine how [...] Read more > >

We reported last week on the Perlmutter amendment.  In the typically understated fashion of accounting professors, the AAA-FASC wrote a letter opposing it. Such an amendment would shift the power to promulgate accounting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to a Systemic Risk Oversight Council, and it would shift the objectives of financial reporting [...] Read more > >

You may know Columbia Business School Professor Stephen Penman as the 14th-most downloaded author on SSRN.  Or you might know him as a Director of the Center for Excellence in Accounting and Security Analysis. Or perhaps as author of Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation. More recently, Stephen has been visible as a critic of the [...] Read more > >

Christian Leuz emailed me with a link to his recent paper with Christian Laux, entitled “Did Fair-Value Accounting Contribute to the Financial Crisis.”  He thought it might be of interest to our readership, and having spent some time with the paper this morning, he is right. In short, the paper’s answer is “no,”  which is [...] Read more > >

I’ve heard some people express the opinion that the FASB’s recent emphasis on an asset-liability approach is just a thinly veiled attempt to move financial reporting more in the direction of fair values. Ignoring the fact that the primacy of assets and liabilities is as old as the conceptual framework itself, I think recent evidence [...] Read more > >

What industries have the largest percentage of their assets measured under fair value standards?  Whisper your answer to the person sitting next to you before clicking to see the answer, courtesy of this paper by Gartenberg and Serafeim of HBS. Click on the graph to enlarge it.  I was surprised to see the high proportions in [...] Read more > >

Georgetown finance professor James Angel has written an interesting piece praising the benefits of what he calls mark-to-management (or what we fair value wonks would call Level 3 inputs), and argues the benefits of including all three dimensions of valuation (cost, market price and management models) in disclosures.  Of course we can’t recognize all of [...] Read more > >

FASB is circulating an Accounting Standards Update that would clarify required disclosures about fair values.  Particularly noteworthy is that the Update proposes a detailed “roll forward” of fair value measurements using significant unobservable inputs (”Level 3″), which would provide a clear breakdown of how the total level 3 measurements changed as a result of: transfers in [...] Read more > >

A few weeks ago, in a post entitled “Why Do Standard Setters Make Such Awful Decisions?,”  I cited Zoe-Vonna Palmrose as one of several academics who think that the FASB’s embrace of fair-value accounting is so obviously mistaken that even children could see it.  Bill Kinney pointed out that my recollection of Zoe-Vonna’s 2005 presentation [...] Read more > >

We had an excellent discussion today with Bob Laux of Microsoft. Whether you are looking for research topics or good stories for your students–financial or managerial–you will find this a very interesting discussion. You can now watch the archive live by going here, waiting through a 15 second commercial, and then clicking the [...] Read more > >

Following up on Lisa’s post, I see that the FASB has summarized the key conclusions of this week’s Board meeting: The Board agreed to propose a model to improve financial reporting for financial instruments.   The Board reached the following decisions: The Board agreed to propose that all financial instruments will be presented on the balance sheet at [...] Read more > >

On Tuesday, July 28th, 4pm ET, Cathy Shakespeare will lead a discussion on securitization.  Cathy will start by giving us a gentle introduction to this complex commercial arrangement, and then use recent research to indicate directions for future work.  To get insights into one of the most central issues in securitization you might start with [...] Read more > >

Details on participation are here. On Wednesday, July 22nd, 11am ET, we will get a preparer’s perspective on the state and future of financial reporting standards from Bob Laux, Senior Director of Financial Accounting and Reporting at Microsoft.  Mr. Laux is responsible for Microsoft’s financial accounting, including  responding to GAAP questions and issues within Microsoft and [...] Read more > >

Cathy Shakespeare sent me this link as we’re finishing off a paper (with Karen Nelson) on fair value. Some are jaw breakers. Good stuff. Read more > >

As I mentioned during a recent session of office hours that I hosted, I believe there are a number of persistent myths in accounting that seem to get passed on from generation to generation.  I promised to share them on the blog, so here they are.  These are essentially a collection of statements that I [...] Read more > >

In our next session of office hours (Tue, June 16th, 4pm ET), we will have our second brainstorming session. For those of you who couldn’t make the first brainstorming session, Bob Lipe led us in a discussion of research ideas related to leasing.  As in any good brainstorming session, Bob wasn’t just giving away research ideas, [...] Read more > >

Christian Leuz sent me this thought piece today (with Christian Laux, forthcoming in Accounting, Organizations and Society), which provides a nice cool splash of realism on the often-overheated debate on fair value accounting. Perfect timing, given that later today Haresh Sapra presents his own views that fair-value accounting poses some serious risks to the stability [...] Read more > >

The last time we had an entire session focused on fair value accounting, our stated intent was primarily to discuss recent evidence on the value relevance of fair value accounting.  It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn toward questions of whether fair value accounting was destabilizing and/or pro-cyclical. This week, University of Chicago’s Haresh [...] Read more > >

A few weeks ago FASB Board member Leslie Seidman joined us for office hours.  We covered a lot of ground, and Ray has already written on some of her ideas for research.  I thought I would summarize her rather cautionary views on fair value accounting for financial instruments.  Playing to the academic audience, Ms. Seidman [...] Read more > >

Leslie Hodder led a discussion of fair value accounting at Office Hours.  We had over 30 avatars present, some of them acting as the eyes and ears of a roomful of faculty and doctoral students.  A number of attendees wanted a copy of  Leslie’s  fair-value slides. Leslie started off the discussion with a review of the [...] Read more > >

Leslie Hodder (Indiana University) will be joining us for FASRI Office Hours at 4pm ET, March 24th, to talk about recent research on Fair Value Accounting. No doubt we will talk a fair bit about FASB’s recent proposals to clarify FAS 157’s discussion on ‘active markets’ and to alter reporting of impairment (see here [...] Read more > >

The FASB just released a Proposed FASB Staff Position that would amend the other-than-temporary (OTT) impairment guidance in two FASB Statements (SFAS 115 and SFAS 124) and in EITF 99-20.  This Proposed FSP seems to make two big changes.  The first relates to the conditions under which management can avoid considering an impairment to be OTT.  Currently, [...] Read more > >

A new FASB Staff Position proposes a 2-step test to determine whether a market is not active. This will hardly satisfy those who think firms shouldn’t have to use fair value accounting for the assets in question in the first place.  But for those who are simply complaining that market prices are ‘fire sale’ prices, [...] Read more > >