This paper examines the capital market pricing implications of nondiscretionary, discretionary, and noise components of loan fair values for a sample of commercial banks. We use a model to partition loan fair values into discretionary and nondiscretionary components using proxies for discretion and nondiscretion. The residual from the model captures the noise component. We hypothesize that the nondiscretionary component is priced on a dollar-for-dollar basis and the residual (noise) component is not priced. The pricing coefficient on the discretionary component is predicted to be positive (negative) depending on whether the motivation for discretion is signaling (opportunism). We find evidence consistent with the hypotheses, implying that the relevance and reliability of loan fair values differs across the three components.
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