【正文】 Plantin et al., 2020a). This argument requires that there are some direct or indirect ties to the accounting system, which trigger the sale of the assets. Allen and Carletti (2020) show that accountingbased regulatory capital requirements for banks can lead to contagion. Bond covenants are often also based on accounting numbers and can create contractual ties. Plantin et al. (2020a) show that a management focused on shortterm accounting earnings can create similar effects, essentially because they care about current market prices which produces indirect ties. Similarly, rating agencies can create indirect ties by using accounting information and issuing ratings that are used in debt contracts or capital requirements. The models by Allen and Carletti (2020) and Plantin et al. (2020a) show that FVA in its pure form, ., marking to market prices under any circumstances, can create contagion effects. The next question is how (and where) to respond to these effects. One alternative is to use HCA. Valuing assets at historical costs essentially insulates banks from market prices and therefore also from prices that are established by the trading activities of other banks and from potential 11negative spillover effects.11 But as Plantin et al. (2020a) point out, HCA may create incentives for banks to engage in inefficient asset sales to realize earnings early. The importance of this problem in practice should not be underestimated. The concern about banks’ ability to engage in socalled “gains trading,” ., selectively selling financial instruments with unrealized gains and keeping those with losses, was a major impetus for introducing FVA for financial instruments (., Wyatt, 1991。 IMF, 2020). The chief concern is that FVA is 7 This point also highlights that measuring assets and liabilities in a consistent way is not a goal per se. See also Gjesdal (1981) and Paul (1992) showing more broadly that the optimal accounting system depends on what we use the accounting numbers for. 9procyclical, ., it exacerbates swings in the financial system, and that it may even cause a downward spiral in financial markets. There are essentially two arguments why FVA can contribute to procyclicality: one in booms and one in busts.8 The first argument is that FVA and asset writeups allow banks to increase their leverage in booms, which in turn makes the financial system more vulnerable and financial crises more severe (., Persaud, 2020。 it results from the use of market values in bilateral contracts. See Section 4 for a discussion of how FVA in financial crises. 7The important question, however, is how to deal with this problem. Potential market inefficiencies can be addressed in a variety of ways and again HCA is not the only alternative. Historical costs do not reflect the current fundamental value of an asset either. Therefore, it might be better to use market values, even if the markets are illiquid, and to supplement them with additional disclosures, ., about the fundamental value of the asset when held to maturity. FVA does not prevent firms from providing additional information, including management’s estimates of fundamental values.6 One might counter this argument with the concern that investors may overlook information in the notes to the financial statements or that they would overreact to fair values based on current market prices despite the disclosure of (higher) fundamental values in the notes. However, we are not aware of any empirical evidence that investors systematically ignore or overlook information in the notes. Having said that, there is a legitimate debate over whether the market fully and correctly impounds financial information in price (., Kothari, 2020). For instance, the market could overreact (., DeBondt and Thaler, 1985). But it is also possible that market reactions are even more extreme if current market prices or fair value estimates are not disclosed to the market. We are not aware of any empirical evidence that investors would be calmer under HCA. Investors are not na239。 that fair values based on models are not reliable。 Veron, 2020).3 In our view, there are problems with both positions. FVA is neither responsible for the crisis nor is it merely a measurement system that reports asset values without having economic effects of its own. In this article, we attempt to make sense of the current fairvalue debate and discuss whether many of the arguments in this debate hold up to further scrutiny. We e to the following four conclusions. First, much of the controversy about FVA results from confusion about what is new and different about FVA as well as different views about the purpose of FVA. In our view, the debate about FVA takes us back to several old accounting issues, like the tradeoff between relevance and reliability, which have been debated for decades. Except in rare circumstances, standard setters will always face these issues and tradeoffs。 NBER Initiative on Global Markets The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business “Providing thought leadership on financial markets, international business and public policy” Electronic copy available at: The Crisis of Fair Value Accounting: Making Sense of the Recent Debate* Christian Laux GoetheUniversity Frankfurt and Christian Leuz The University of Chicago Booth School of Business amp。 NBER April 2020 (Forthing in Accounting, Organizations and Society) Abstract The recent financial crisis has led to a vigorous debate about the pros and cons of fairvalue accounting (FVA). This debate presents a major challenge for FVA going forward and standard setters’ push to extend FVA into other areas. In this arti