Although fair value accounting has been adopted by standard setters for numerous reporting elements spanning a number of industries, it is difficult to identify a single setting in which fair value reporting applies to most of a firm’s operating assets, and in which multiple attributes of fair value reporting can be observed simultaneously. The European real estate industry is among the few viable settings in this regard, with several advantageous features. First, firms in this industry share a common primary operating asset: real estate (i.e., investment property). That is, these firms acquire (through purchase, lease, or development), manage, and sell real estate to generate profits through rentals and/or capital appreciation. Typically, firms either acquire legal ownership through a purchase or hold the property under a finance lease. Accordingly, the primary asset for our sample firms is held constant: long-lived tangible real estate assets.There are over 180 publicly traded real estate firms domiciled across most European countries, with an aggregate equity market value exceeding €150 billion on December 31,2005 (the mid-point of our analysis period).Second, this industry exhibits substantial variation in how firms report property assets. Prior to mandatory IFRS adoption in 2005, European countries’ domestic standards varied considerably in the required accounting treatment for real estate assets: whereas some required reporting at amortized cost (e.g., Germany), others required reporting at fair value (e.g., the UK). Even upon IFRS adoption, which introduced mandatory reporting of investment property fair values, variation continued to some extent. Specifically, under the relevant standard, International Accounting Standard (IAS) 40: Investment Property (IASB,2000), firms may choose between a ‘fair value model’ (recognition of property asset fair values on the balance sheet, with fair value changes recognized in net income) and a ‘cost model’ (recognition of property assets at amortized cost with mandatory disclosure of fair values in the footnotes). Firms also vary in their exposure to assets reported at fair value, owing to non-real estate assets, as well as the complexity of the fair value measurement, Further, the industry is well-developed.