The Future of Financial Reporting: Insights from Research

Research offers insights that, if heeded and built upon, could improve financial reporting, thereby contributing to a more prosperous society. In particular, research suggests improvement could stem from greater use of fair value; a performance statement designed to reveal the information embedded in changes in fair value; better information to help investors assess the value of intangible assets; more specific information about risk and uncertainty; information that is unbiased, rather than conservative; acceptance of a degree of earnings management together with a determination of how much earnings management is acceptable; and a financial reporting package designed to convey information users need, which presumably is broader than today's financial statements.     

Value relevance of proportionate consolidation versus the equity method: Evidence from Hong Kong

Whether proportionate consolidation (PC) or the equity method (EM) provides more informative financial statements is a controversial issue. This study uses data from listed companies in Hong Kong to investigate the value relevance of the EM compared with PC during 2005–2008 when the local word-for-word equivalent HKAS 31 offered the same options. The results of this study provide evidence that PC does not offer higher value relevance than the EM. PC’s horizontal aggregation of a portion of the operations, assets and liabilities of the jointly controlled entities with those of the venturer is less informative to investors than the EM’s vertical aggregation.     

Fair value disclosures and crash risk

In response to the public criticism of the inadequate disclosures mandated by SFAS No. 157, Fair Value Measurements, the FASB issued ASU (Accounting Standards Update) 2010–06, Improving Disclosures about Fair Value Measurements, and ASU 2011–04, Amendments to Achieve Common Fair Value Measurement and Disclosure Requirements, in an effort to increase the reporting transparency. We examine whether the increased fair value disclosures required by these two updates effectively decrease crash risk, defined as the frequency of extreme negative stock returns. In support of the hypothesis, we find that increased transparency from these updates reduces crash risk among U.S. banking firms and that the reduction is greater in banks that have a higher level of Level 3 financial assets.     

The composite iteration algorithm for finding efficient and financially fair risk-sharing rules

We consider the problem of finding an efficient and fair ex-ante rule for division of an uncertain monetary outcome among a finite number of von Neumann–Morgenstern agents. Efficiency is understood here, as usual, in the sense of Pareto efficiency subject to the feasibility constraint. Fairness is defined as financial fairness with respect to a predetermined pricing functional. We show that efficient and financially fair allocation rules are in one-to-one correspondence with positive eigenvectors of a nonlinear homogeneous and monotone mapping associated to the risk sharing problem. We establish relevant properties of this mapping. On the basis of this, we obtain a proof of existence and uniqueness of solutions via nonlinear Perron–Frobenius theory, as well as a proof of global convergence of the natural iterative algorithm. We argue that this algorithm is computationally attractive, and discuss its rate of convergence.     

Pricing CDS spreads with Credit Valuation Adjustment using a mixture copula

Credit derivatives pricing models before Basel III ignored losses in market value stemming from higher probability of counterparty default. We propose a general credit derivatives pricing model to evaluate a Credit Default Swap (CDS) with counterparty risk, including the Credit Valuation Adjustment (CVA) in order to optimize the economic capital allocation. We work from the model proposed by Luciano (2003, Working Paper, International Center of Economic Research) and the general pricing representation established by Sorensen and Bollier (Financial Analysts Journal 1994;50(3):23–33) to provide a model close to the market practice, easy to implement and fitting with Basel III framework. We approach the dependence between counterparty risk and that of the reference entity with a technical tool: the copula, in particular, the mixture one that combines common “extreme” copulas. We study the CDS's vulnerability in extreme dependence cases. By varying Spearman's rho, the mixture copula covers a broad spectrum of dependence and ensures closed form prices. We end up with an application on real market data.     

REAL OPTIONS AND THE CROSS‐SECTION OF EXPECTED STOCK RETURNS

This paper surveys the theoretical literature investigating the effect of firms’ investment flexibility on the cross‐section of expected stock returns. Real options analysis derives firms’ value‐maximizing investment policies as functions of exogenous fundamental drivers of profitability and calculates firms’ market values as functions of the same variables. These functions yield the relationship between expected stock returns and firm fundamentals. Several plausible explanations for the value premium – the high average stock returns earned by firms with high book‐to‐market ratios – emerge from this literature.     

EXTREME VALUE THEORY IN FINANCE: A SURVEY

Extreme value theory is concerned with the study of the asymptotic distribution of extreme events, that is to say events which are rare in frequency and huge in magnitude with respect to the majority of observations. Statistical methods derived from it have been employed increasingly in finance, especially for risk measurement. This paper surveys some of those main applications, namely for testing different distributional assumptions for the data, for Value‐at‐Risk and Expected Shortfall calculations, for asset allocation under safety‐first type constraints, and for the study of contagion and dependence across markets under conditions of stress.     

Fair Value Measurements of Control Premiums

As the overview of the current state of research within this paper shows, the debate around fair value measurements is far from over. This paper analyzes fair value measurement requirements in a controversial scenario, namely when a control premium exists. The analyses of the paper show that, while measurement rules around control premiums could have a material impact on fair value measurements and the financial statements as a whole, significant fair value measurement issues remain unresolved. The conclusion is that fair value measurements should include or exclude control premiums consistently. It is argued that including control premiums for all fair value measurements is the most faithful representation of the underlying economic phenomenon. This paper contributes to the fair value measurement debate by comparing the merits of alternative fair value measurements for control premiums and highlights an area where researchers, investors, and other users should exercise caution when evaluating financial statements.