The Routledge Companion to Fair Value in Accounting
Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Marketing Series

The concept of "fair value" marked a major departure from traditional cost accounting. In theory, under this approach a balance sheet that better reflects the current value of assets and liabilities. Critics of fair value argue that it is less useful over longer time frames and prone to distortion by market inefficiencies resulting in procyclicality in the financial system by exacerbating market swings.

Comprising contributions from a unique mixture of academics, standard setters and practitioners, and edited by internationally recognized experts, this book, on a controversial and intensely debated topic, is a comprehensive reference source which:

• examines the use of fair value in international financial reporting standards and the US standard SFAS 157 Fair Value Measurement, setting out the case for and against
• looks at fair value from a number of different theoretical and practical perspectives, including a critical review of the merits and arguments against the use of fair value accounting
• explores fair value accounting in practice, involvement in the Great Financial Crisis, implications for managerial reporting discretion, compensation and investment

This volume is an indispensable reference that is deserving of a place on the bookshelves of both libraries and all those working in, studying, or researching the areas of international accounting, financial accounting and reporting.

1. Does the usage of fair values increase systemic risks? 2. Fair Value and the Conceptual Framework 3. Fair Value Accounting: A Standard Setting Perspective 4. Have the standard setters gone too far, or not far enough, with fair value accounting? 5. Shareholder value, financialization and accounting regulation: making sense of fair value adoption in the European union 6. Measuring Fair Value when Markets Malfunction: Evidence from the Financial Crisis 7. Fair Value Accounting in Financial Institutions 8. Bank Risk Management – and Fair Value Accounting 9. The Use of Fair Value Accounting in Risk Management in Non-Financial Firms 10. The History of the Fair Value Term and its Measurements 11. The "fairness" of fair value accounting: marking-to-market, marking-to-model, and financial reporting management 12. Let the Fox Guard the Henhouse: How Relaxing the Three-Level Fair Value Hierarchy Increases the Reliability of Fair Value Estimates 13. Fair Value Accounting -A Manager’s Perspective 14. Tax Related Implications of Fair Value Accounting 15. Fair Value Accounting and Executive Compensation 16. Fair value and the formation of financial market prices through ignorance and hazard 17. Fair Value Accounting: China Experience 18. Fair Values and Family Firms

Gilad Livne is Professor of Accounting at the University of Exeter, UK.

Garen Markarian is Chair of Financial Accounting at WHU-Koblenz, Germany and Professor of Accounting at the University of Exeter, UK.