We use the EU stress tests and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis to study the consequences of supervisory disclosure of banks’ sovereign risk exposures. We test the idea that a mandatory one‐time disclosure induces an increase in voluntary disclosures about sovereign risk in the following periods and, through the shift in the voluntary disclosure equilibrium, increases the liquidity of banks’ shares. First, we find that the timing and content of different mandatory disclosure events helps explain the levels of stress‐test banks’ voluntary disclosures about sovereign risk. Second, although the bid‐ask spreads of stress test participants generally increased after the mandatory stress test in 2011, our results suggest that the decrease in market liquidity is entirely attributable to those stress‐test participants that did not commit to voluntarily maintaining the disclosures of sovereign risk exposure.

This study investigates the role of individual managers in banks' financial reporting. We exploit the connectedness between different managers and find that individual bank managers explain approximately 19 percent of banks' loan loss provisions. This observation is consistent with the substantial reporting discretion that individual bank managers use in the estimation of loan loss provisions and that is increasingly subject to financial stability concerns by prudential supervisors. Our results suggest that these concerns are valid, as individual management discretion is associated with greater discretionary loan loss provisions and proxies for opportunistic accounting, especially the reduction in the timeliness of these provisions and the lesser degree to which the allowance for credit losses maps into future charge-offs. These findings are relevant for the design of regulatory measures aimed at limiting the managerial influence on accounting choices in banking and can inform debates on the desirability of discretion within the reporting process of banks.

This paper examines banks’ disclosures and loss recognition in the 2007–2009 financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. We show that, going into the financial crisis, banks’ disclosures about relevant risk exposures were relatively sparse. Such disclosures came later after major concerns about banks’ exposures had arisen in markets. The recognition of loan losses also was slow and delayed relative to prevailing market expectations. Among the possible explanations for this evidence, our analysis indicates that banks’ reporting incentives played a key role, which has important implications for bank supervision and the new expected loss model for loan accounting. We also provide evidence that shielding regulatory capital from accounting losses through prudential filters can dampen banks’ incentives for corrective actions. Overall, our analysis reveals several significant challenges if accounting and financial reporting are to contribute to financial stability.

Politicians frequently intervene in the regulation of financial accounting. Evidence from the accounting literature shows that regulatory capture by special interests helps explain these interventions. However, many accounting rules have broad economic or social consequences, such as their effects on income distribution or private sector subsidies. The perception of these consequences varies with a politician's ideology. Therefore, if accounting rules produce those consequences, ideology plausibly spills over and explains a politician's stance on the technical accounting issue, beyond special interest pressure. We use two prominent U.S. political debates about fair value accounting and the expensing of employee stock options to disentangle the role of ideology from special interest pressure. In both debates, ideology explains politicians’ involvement at exactly those points when the debate focuses on the economic consequences of accounting regulation (i.e., bank bailouts and top management compensation). Once the debates focus on more technical issues, connections to special interests remain the dominant force.

Banks often adjust their financial reporting in response to supervisory intervention. However, many banks operate under multiple supervisors with varying preferences. We examine how banks respond to such conflicting oversight within the European Banking Union, where the European Central Bank (ECB) is the central authority. The ECB’s Asset Quality Review revealed that its preferred asset valuations diverged from many banks’ IFRS-compliant practices that were previously accepted by local supervisors. Banks voluntarily aligned their reporting with the nonbinding preferences of the new central supervisor, although the adjustments varied across jurisdictions. Alignment was weaker when central and local supervisory objectives conflicted and stronger when joint supervision mitigated regulatory capture. Overall, these adjustments enhanced the informativeness of loan loss provisioning. With aligned reporting preferences across supervisory layers, the introduction of a central supervisor can thus significantly improve bank reporting and transparency, even without formal enforcement. Data Availability: The data used in this study are available from the sources identified in the manuscript.

We examine how the presence of multiple supervisory agencies affects firm‐level compliance in form and substance with disclosure regulations. This analysis is important because coordination problems among regulators are frequently present in practice but often overlooked in academic research. We exploit that banks are subject to equivalent risk disclosure rules under securities laws (IFRS 7) and banking regulation (Pillar 3 of the Basel II Accord) but that different regulators start enforcing the rules at different points in time. We find that banks substantially increase their formal risk disclosures upon the adoption of Pillar 3 even if they already had to comply with the same requirements under IFRS 7. The effects are stronger if the central bank is responsible for bank supervision and bank regulators are equipped with more supervisory resources, but are less pronounced if the securities market regulator is an independent entity. In turn, banks facing more market pressures are more compliant with the rules. We further find persistent liquidity benefits of the increased risk disclosures but only after Pillar 3 became effective and its compliance was enforced by the banking regulator. Our results suggest that formal and material compliance with risk disclosure regulation are a function of both the resources of the supervisory agency and its incentive alignment with the regulated firms. In our setting, the banking regulator seems more effective in fulfilling this role.