U.S. and international accounting standards mandate recognition and/or disclosure of fair value information for an increasing number of items. Fair value estimates require judgment, introducing the possibility of biases in measurements, measurers, and/or models. In addition, unanticipated changes in market risk result in realized values differing from fair value estimates. Accompanying the shift to fair value accounting is the emergence of voluntary disclosures in audited financial statement footnotes that alert investors to management’s concerns about the reliability of mandated fair value information. We refer to such disclosures as reliability disavowals (hereafter, disavowals). In our paper, Are voluntary disclosures that disavow the reliability of mandated fair value information informative or opportunistic? forthcoming in the Journal of Accounting and Economics as published by Elsevier, we examine whether disavowals are informative; that is whether they are a truthful revelation by management that their fair value estimates are unreliable. We also consider that managerial opportunism may contribute to—or even solely motivate—the decision to disavow.

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