Accountancy profs win best paper award

For their research into fair-value accounting, Brad Badertscher, Jeff Burks and Peter Easton received one of the American Accounting Association’s highest distinctions: the AAA Financial Accounting and Reporting Section Best Paper Award for 2013. Their paper, “A Convenient Scapegoat: Fair Value Accounting by Commercial Banks during the Financial Crisis,” was selected from among all financial accounting and reporting studies published in the past five years.

In “A Convenient Scapegoat,” (The Accounting Review, 2012, pp. 59-90), the Mendoza College researchers countered the popular notion that the practice known as fair-value accounting worsened the recent recession’s impact on banks by restricting their ability to lend money. Badertscher, Burks and Easton suggested that fair value was being used as a scapegoat by some in the banking industry seeking to loosen some of the regulatory controls that were put in place during the past three decades.

The Best Paper Award is intended to enhance interaction among academics and practicing members, and to incentivize research topics relevant to the practicing profession and standard-setters.