The use of accounting measures and disclosures in banks’ contracts and regulation suggests that the quality of banks’ financial reporting is central to the efficacy of market discipline and nonmarket mechanisms in limiting banks’ development of debt and risk overhangs in economic good times and in mitigating the adverse consequences of those overhangs for the stability of the financial system in downturns. This essay examines how research on banks’ financial reporting, informed by the financial economics literature on banking, can generate insights about how to enhance the stability of the financial system. We begin with a foundational discussion of how aspects of banks’ accounting and disclosures may affect stability. We then evaluate representative papers in the empirical literature on banks’ financial reporting and stability, pointing out the research design issues that empirical accounting researchers need to confront to develop well‐specified tests able to generate reliably interpretable findings. To this end, we provide examples of settings amenable to addressing these issues. We conclude with considerations for accounting standard setters and financial system policy makers.

William H. Beaver, Stephen G. Ryan, Biases and Lags in Book Value and Their Effects on the Ability of the Book-to-Market Ratio to Predict Book Return on Equity, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 127-148

Banking, Disclosures, Bank loan portfolio compositions, Market reaction

Firms measure fair values using Level 2 or 3 inputs when items do not trade in liquid markets, limiting market discipline over the measurements. We provide evidence that firms holding higher proportions of financial instruments measured at Level 2 and 3 fair values report more conditionally conservative comprehensive income attributable to fair value measurements, consistent with firms trying to mitigate investors' discounting of the measurements. We further predict and find that this conditional conservatism (1) increases with governance mechanisms that increase the strength and persistence of firms' incentives to report conservatively and (2) decreases with firms’ earnings management incentives.

Beaver, Lambert and Morse (1980) employ a regression of percentage change in prices on percentage change in earnings in which data are grouped by the dependent variable. Reverse regression offers a more intuitive and direct way to assess the information content of security prices, the objective of Beaver et al. While grouping is asymptotically equivalent, reverse regression is a more efficient way of examining the incremental explanatory power of lagged values of percentage change in price with respect to accounting earnings.

We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers' attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and the children's test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations. We estimate a structural dynamic labor supply model and find that teachers respond strongly to financial incentives. Our model is used to compute cost-minimizing compensation policies.