The typical cost analysis of an environmental regulation consists of an engineering estimate of the compliance costs. In industries where fixed costs are an important determinant of market structure, this static analysis ignores the dynamic effects of the regulation on entry, investment, and market power. I evaluate the welfare costs of the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act on the U.S. Portland cement industry, accounting for these effects through a dynamic model of oligopoly in the tradition of Ericson and Pakes (1995). Using the two-step estimator of Bajari, Benkard, and Levin (2007), I recover the entire cost structure of the industry, including the distributions of sunk entry costs and capacity adjustment costs. My primary finding is that the Amendments have significantly increased the sunk cost of entry, leading to a loss of between $810M and $3.2B in product market surplus. A static analysis misses the welfare penalty on consumers, and obtains the wrong sign of the welfare effects on incumbent firms.

This paper constructs a model of accrual measurement and tests its implications for the evolution of the book-to-market ratio. The model captures the intuition that book value is untimely or smoothed relative to market value, so that movements in market value have relatively high variance and low predictability, compared with movements in book value. Empirical tests of the model use lagged market value changes to forecast the mean reversion of the book-to-market ratio. This paper complements recent research investigating the role of book-to-market ratios in security analysis. Accounting theorists (e.g., Edwards and Bell [1961] and Feltham and Ohlson [1995]) have long recognized the critical role of book-to-market ratios as predictors of abnormal earnings in earnings-based valuation models. Tests of such valuation models (e.g., Ou and Penman [1993]) confront the practical problem of determining the horizon beyond which abnormal earnings are expected to be zero. The model in this paper implies that this horizon is determined by the remaining useful life of assets, and that the expected path of abnormal earnings over this horizon reflects the pattern of expiration of the useful lives of assets in place.

We identify covenants in commercial loan contracts that require public borrowers to periodically disclose two types of accounting-related private information to lenders: projected financial statements for future periods and monthly historical financial statements. We hypothesize and provide evidence that: (1) loan contracts include these covenants in settings where they enhance lenders’ loan contract monitoring; (2) the covenants are positively associated with the frequency of loan contract amendments; and (3) lenders trade on the borrower private information they receive in secondary loan markets. We further show that the two types of covenants have predictably different determinants and effects.

ABSTRACT: This essay describes implications of the subprime crisis for accounting. First, I overview the institutional and market aspects of subprime lending with the greatest accounting relevance. Second, I discuss the critical aspects of FAS No. 157’s fair value definition and measurement guidance and explain the practical difficulties that have arisen in applying this definition and guidance to subprime positions during the crisis. I also raise a potential issue regarding the application of FAS No. 159’s fair value option. Third, I discuss issues that have arisen regarding sale accounting for subprime mortgage securitizations under FAS No. 140 and consolidation of securitization entities under FIN No. 46(R) associated with mortgage foreclosures and modifications. Fourth, I indicate ways that accounting academics can address the implications of the subprime crisis in their research and teaching.

Linear Regression Estimation of Discrete Choice Models with Nonparametric Distributions of Random Coefficients by Patrick Bajari, Jeremy T. Fox and Stephen P. Ryan. Published in volume 97, issue 2, pages 459-463 of American Economic Review, May 2007

[Prior research has found that loan loss provisions are positively associated with bank stock returns and future cash flows, conditional on less discretionary information about loan default. We find that these positive valuation implications obtain only for loan loss provisions for low regulatory capital banks in the fourth fiscal quarter. Our regulatory capital-based tests are motivated by the idea that increased discretionary loan loss provisions are plausibly good news only for banks which appear to have loan default risk problems based on prior information. Our fiscal quarter tests are motivated by findings in prior literature that suggest that managers have incentives to delay income decreasing accruals until the fourth quarter when the audit occurs, implying that income decreasing accruals are more likely, and therefore more expected, in the fourth quarter than in other fiscal quarters (Mendenhall and Nichols 1988; Boyd et al. 1994).]