Essays on fair value reporting

The three papers in the dissertation examine reporting of fair values by financial institutions. In the first paper I analyze Embedded Value (EV) reporting by firms with life insurance operations to assess the impact of unregulated financial reporting on transparency and to examine the institutional characteristics that promote unregulated reporting. In the second paper, we examine whether information risk is reflected in equity betas for a large sample of U.S. banks, exploiting recent mandatory disclosures of financial instruments designated as fair value level 1, 2, and 3, which indicate progressively more illiquid and opaque fianancial instruments. Finally the third paper contributes to one of the central debates from the 2008 financial crisis: whether fair value accounting positively or negatively impacted firm valuation during this period.