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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether commercial banks manage earnings through their use of Level 3 valuation under The Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 157 (FAS 157), Fair Value Measurements. To achieve this goal, the authors investigate the association between banks' performance and size with the percentage of Level 3 inputs for valuing assets and liabilities. The FAS 157 requires or permits US listed firms to adopt one of the three levels of inputs to measure and report fair values of their assets and liabilities. Level 1 input is based on quoted prices in the active markets; Level 2 is from the observable markets other than quoted prices; while Level 3 is based on unobservable and firm‐generated inputs.

The authors extract information from all the 10Q‐reports submitted by the US commercial banks (SEC Code 6021) for the first two quarters of 2008. Since Level 3 input is subject to the highest level of managerial discretion, this is expected to be an avenue for earnings management. Multivariate regression was applied to test whether the banks' performance and size are associated with a higher level of Level 3 input.

Out of 329 quarterly bank observations, the authors find large banks and poor performing banks with lower returns on assets, lower cash flows, and higher amounts of provision for loan losses, use more Level 3 inputs on valuing their assets and liabilities.

The results suggest that US commercial banks use FAS157 as an avenue for earnings management. The results have implications for the accounting standard setters, banking sector and policy decision makers.

This is the first paper providing evidence that banks use fair value measurements to manipulate earnings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether levels-classified fair values of US banks based on SFAS 157: Fair Value Measurements, as recognised in the quarterly financial statements of the banks over the period from 2008 until 2015, have predictive value in relation to the banks’ future financial performance measured by operating cash flows and earnings over a three-quarter horizon period. In addition, we consider whether the global financial crisis (GFC) impacted the relationship between SFAS 157–based levels‐classified fair values and bank future financial performance.

We develop hypotheses connecting the net levels-classified bank fair values based on SFAS 157 with banks’ future financial performance. We test the hypotheses by estimating three-period quarters’ ahead forecasting models. We also use these models to test for the impact of the GFC on the relationship between the fair values and future financial performance.

Our findings suggest that the levels-classified net fair values based on SFAS 157 have predictive value in relation to future cash flows for banks. There is significant variation, across the levels, in the predictive value of levels-classified net fair values for future performance. Our findings indicate that the GFC has limited impact on the predictive value for cash flows, but the GFC had a significant adverse impact on earnings, and, with allowance for the effect of the GFC, the Level 2 net fair values have predictive value for the future earnings.

The study provides the first direct empirical evidence on the relationship between the SFAS 157 levels-classified quarterly bank fair values recognised in publicly available financial statements and banks’ future performance. Our results are consistent with the findings from earlier research (Ehalaiye et al., 2017) using annual data disclosed in the supplementary notes to the financial statements of US banks based on SFAS 107. The study, makes a significant contribution to the question of frequency of reporting and to the disclosure vs recognition debate. The study has implications for policy makers, regulators and accounting standards setters such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board in evaluating the use of fair value measurement in financial reporting.

Myopic going concern practice refers to the current audit going concern opinion that a firm is rewarded a favorable going concern opinion as long as it has the capability to satisfy its debt obligation in the following year. We show, via a structural agency problem we develop in the paper, that such a practice has a potential economic cost to the firm. We study Lucent Technologies Inc. in detail for its loss in economic value and also measure the magnitude of this impact with 500 companies. We find that Lucent should have lost its going concern status in 2002 as it had to sell off its assets to meet debt obligations and nearly 18% of the 500 firms suffer some degree of economic loss due to the agency problem.

This paper presents the major findings of recently completed research in the UK concerning the attributes of information as an asset and its impact on organisational performance. The research study employed an automated information asset- and attribute-scoring grid exercise and semi-structured open-ended interviews with 45 senior UK managers in four case study organisations. The information asset-scoring grid was developed to provide a simple visual representation of information assets and attributes using Excel charts. The semi-structured open-ended interviews aimed to identify the attributes of information assets considered significant by 45 senior UK managers and to explore relevant issues such as the value of information and organisational effectiveness.

Marketers frequently lament the lack of representation of marketing in the boardroom and the short tenure of CMOs. The most common explanations offered are that marketing is not perceived as a strategic discipline and that marketers do not demonstrate a strong enough understanding of how the business makes money.

Financial accounting is how “score is kept” in terms of business performance. It is, therefore, in the self-interest of marketers to become familiar with financial reporting. Doing so will allow them to understand how marketing activities are recorded. In addition, academic researchers need to understand the meaning of the financial measures that they often use as the metrics of success when researching marketing strategy questions.

This is especially important since financial reporting generally does not recognize assets created by marketing investments. In order to substantiate a claim that “brands are assets”, marketers must be able to explain how the financial accounting rules misrepresent economic reality and why managers might use a different set of principles for management reporting.

We argue that the misrepresentation of market-based assets has two forms of negative impact for marketers: external and internal. The external problems are that financial statements are not especially informative about the value of marketing for the providers of capital and do not provide a true portrait of the economic resource base of the company. The internal problems are that marketers cannot point to valuable assets that they are creating, nor can they be effectively held accountable for the way that these assets are managed given that the assets are not recorded.

We do not expect immediate radical changes in financial reporting because financial accounting rules are designed with the specific interests of the suppliers of capital (debt and equity) in mind. To influence financial accounting developments, such as encouraging greater disclosure of marketing activity in the notes to the published accounts, marketers must be able to communicate in language understood by accountants and the current users of financial accounts. To aid this we provide guidance for marketers on the purpose and practices of accounting. We also discuss how academic marketing researchers might wish to adjust financial accounting data to capitalize a proportion of marketing expenses for companies where marketing is a primary driver of business performance.

To examine how relations with social groups, including shareholders, customers, employees and vendors among other stakeholders are pivotal to generating wealth and optimising long‐term shareholder value.

The paper explores the values intrinsic in stakeholder relations and examines why it should be included in the core of evaluation, auditing and management of organisations to create wealth, value and corporate profit.

The concept of organisations with values that extend from physical assets, intellectual property, process, know‐how, knowledge brand and reputation attributes is understood as being part of the value of companies. Stakeholder relationships are intangible assets and there is a significant body of opinion that identifies intangible assets as a major driver in the global economy, corporate survival and success. There is a pivotal management role in relationship management which is the lever by which value from intangibles is optimised.

Describes how, for companies in the twenty‐first century, the creation of value increasingly depends on intangible assets such as knowledge, systems, data, intellectual property, brands and market relationships. This opens up a new area of public relations practice whereby public relations managers take responsibility for the creation of value through relationships throughout organisations.