6. Conclusions
The recent financial crisis has increased the saliency of reliability concerns about fair value disclosures. We contribute
to the ongoing discussion about the role of fair value information in financial reporting by examining voluntary disclosures
in audited financial statements that explicitly disavow the reliability of mandated fair value estimates. We examine
disavowals of stock option compensation (SOC) estimates disclosed under SFAS 123. In particular, we provide evidence
about whether these disavowals are informative or opportunistic about the reliability of the volatility estimates used as
inputs into the SOC option-pricing models.
We conduct three sets of analyses. Across all the analyses we find evidence consistent with the disavowals being
informative and only limited evidence that they are opportunistic. In our first test, the decision to disavow is positively
associated with four factors—short firm trading history, historical volatility that is itself volatile, lack of exchange-traded
options, and large differences between historical volatility and independent estimates of future volatility—indicative of
volatility estimates being unreliable. In contrast, we find modest evidence of opportunism. None of the three opportunism
proxies are associated positively with the disavowal decision in the initial period, but one, abnormal compensation, is
positively associated in 2001–2005.
Our second set of tests examines forecast bias in managers’ volatility estimates. We find no evidence of downward bias
in disavowal managers’ mean volatility estimates relative to either realized volatility or three ex ante volatility benchmarks