Fair value accounting and management opportunism on earnings management in banking sector: First evidence

Accounting standard boards (IASB and FASB) have chosen fair value accounting (FVA) approach to help financial reporting users in the decision-making process. During recent years, an intense debate arose about the trade-off between relevance and reliability of accounting information in this approach. Even if fair value based information could be considered highly relevant and helpful from an investor’s perspective, many authors outline problems related to fair value hierarchy valuation of financial instruments. In particular, the discretionary use of unobservable inputs in financial instruments valuation process can support earnings management strategy underlying the risk for emerging agency problems, moral hazard behaviour and management short-termism. Stating that, after providing a literature review focused on management behaviour related to FVA, the main objective of the paper is identifying possible relationships between FVA valuations and earning quality observing a sample of US and European banks listed in the period 2011-2016 based on Šodan model (Sodan, 2015). Results show a negative and strong relationship between FVA and earning quality for US banks; results for European listed banks do not provide any strong evidence.