This study examined the association between fair value accounting and reliability of accounting information. The study adopted survey research along with quantitative methods. Users of the accounting information represented by corporate investment analysts and corporate portfolio managers were the respondents for the purpose of this study. The population size was one hundred and sixty-one (161) users of accounting information decomposed into one hundred (100) corporate investment analysts and sixty-one (61) corporate portfolio managers. The primary source of data was employed with the structured questionnaire as an instrument used to collect the data. Data was collected through the administration of 161 copies of the questionnaire to both corporate investment analysts and corporate portfolio managers. One hypothesis was formulated and was tested using the Pearson product moment correlation technique at a significant level of 5% and 10% while the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was engaged to analyze the data. Findings revealed a significant association between fair value accounting and reliability of accounting information of the firms in Nigeria. Hence, the study recommended that adequate and regular training programs and conferences on fair value accounting application have to be organized. This is because most of the employees of the companies in Nigeria did not understand how to use fair value in an inactive market, appropriately. Thus, it is of great importance that they were trained to understand different valuations and estimation techniques of fair value; how and when to apply them in the measurement of assets and liabilities in the financial statement.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between stock market development, business cycle and risk of the banks. The statistical population of the study is all banks whose shares were accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2015. The study selects 10 banks, which were active throughout the entire research period on the stock market. The research data were extracted from the financial statements of the companies and analyzed using regression models based on panel data. The research findings show that there was a direct and significant relationship between stock market development and risk of banks. In addition, the effect of stock market development on risk of banks was different in the presence or absence of a crisis, and the financial crisis in banks reduced the impact of the financial development on the risk of banks. The results also show that during the periods of commercial boom, the effect of the financial market development on the risk of banks was more than the periods of the recession.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a well-known method used to measure the efficiency of decision making units. In this paper, we study the impact of the financial crisis while integrating DEA efficiency measures with Support Vector Machines (SVM). Moreover, to account for the heterogeneity effect in the efficiency measures, the gap statistical method of Tibshirani, et al., (2001) [Tibshirani, R., Walther, G., & Hastie, T. (2001). Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), 63(2), 411-423.] is applied in order to achieve the optimal number of cluster. This study uses December quarterly panel data consisting of Farm Credit Agricultural Banks data from 2005 to 2016. We find strong evidence that the efficiency measures were stationary prior to the financial crisis (2005-2006), during the financial crisis (2007-2009) and post financial crisis (2010-2016). The results further show that the integrated DEA-SVM provide a lower performance during 2007-2009. Furthermore, the results show that the Agricultural banking sector was both efficient and stable over the period being analysed.

During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been successfully used for measuring the relative efficiency of financial or non-financial firms. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of five Canadian banks versus 6 US big banks using DEA method. The study considers the number of employees and total assets as input and net revenue is used as the output of the DEA model. The data are collected from the official statements of the banks for the fiscal year of 2017. The results indicate that 6 US banks maintained an average efficiency of 0.87 but the average efficiency of Canadian banks was 0.72. While two US banks maintained an efficiency of one, the other US banks demonstrate relatively well in terms of the performance. In Canada, while one bank performed relatively well, the performance of the other Canadian banks were not as good as the US banks.