Watkins Paper Accepted by The Accounting Review

Author: Lorie Marsh

Jessie Watkins' “Usefulness of Interest Income Sensitivity Disclosures” was recently accepted by The Accounting Review. The study examines multiple dimensions of usefulness of banks’ interest income sensitivity disclosures. We find these disclosures are predictive of future realized changes in net interest income and appear to be used by a number of market participants, including financial analysts and equity investors. These results suggest that interest income sensitivity disclosures are informative measures of interest rate risk and contradict assertions that these disclosures are useless due to lack of relevance of income sensitivity, poor modeling techniques, and/or redundancy relative to regulatory data.