Financial Reporting and Fair Value: Where Do We Stand?

Over the past two decades, the accounting standards under which large companies determine and report their performance measures have led to much debate. Indeed, a wide-reaching movement, originally initiated by the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), and spread at an international level by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), aimed to replace historical cost with the market-based concept of fair value. Fair value can potentially be used for measuring a large number of non-financial assets and liabilities (e.g. goodwill, post-retirement scheme values, share-based payments) and can therefore serve as the basis for a new corporate accounting model aiming to provide a more accurate view of the future cash flow estimates' and investment opportunities' uncertainties within financial reports. Based on the extent literature, this article discusses the usefulness of financial information disclosed under the fair value approach. In this respect, the key question—is fair value relevant?—will be analysed in a threefold way: (1) Do fair value-based "accounting numbers" help better estimate the value of a company and the intrinsic risk relating to its activity? (2) How informative are they for financial statements' users? (3) How useful is fair value information for decision-making?