Date
March 24, 2010
Location
Chicago Booth London Campus
Woolgate Exchange
25 Basinghall St
London EC2V 5HA
UK
Program
19.00 Registration
19.30 Program
20.30 Networking Reception
Registration
The Economic Consequences of Increasing Accounting Transparency
Haresh Sapra, Professor of Accounting, Chicago Booth
Sapra will provide two general insights that are useful in evaluating the economic trade-offs of alternative accounting measurement rules. First, when there are multiple imperfections in the world, restricting a strict subset of it need not always improve welfare. Second, a firm is not a black box that operates independently of the measurement environment. Measuring a firm's operations affects the firm's actions which, in turn, affect the underlying distribution of cash flows that is being measured.
Using these two insights, Sapra will discuss the economic consequences of accounting measurement rules that strive for greater transparency. In particular, he focuses on the costs and benefits of fair value accounting and its implications for financial stability.
Read Sapra's article What Are the Economic Trade-offs in the Fair Value Debate? (PDF)
