土地财政抑制了企业创新吗?——基于信贷错配视角的分析

基于一般均衡框架,考量房价、土地财政与企业创新之间的关系。研究发现：金融市场存在摩擦时,土地作为重要的抵押资产,房价波动和土地财政会扭曲创新资源的配置,在短期和长期对创新产生不同的影响。短期房价上升通过土地财政推动政府支出增加和总产出扩张,同时带动了企业的研发投入。当面临新的投资机会时,企业可以通过出售房产,缓解流动性约束。但在长期,土地财政引致的政府债务挤出了企业信贷,部门间信贷错配抑制了企业研发投入,同时高房价会导致企业转移部分资源投资房产,部门内资源错配进一步抑制了企业创新,从而降低了长期经济增长率,政府增加土地供给,则会弱化政府债务对企业创新要素的挤出效应。     

Systematic Risk and Revenue Volatility

We introduce the degree of economic leverage (DEL) as an extension of the existing method of decomposing beta and assess its incremental explanatory power through empirical testing. The DEL is defined as the percentage change in the firm's sales resulting from a unit percentage change attributable to an exogenous economic disturbance. The exogenous economic disturbance employed is the ratio of long‐term T‐bond rates to short‐term T‐bill rates. The evidence supports the DEL's role in explaining systematic risk at both the industry and portfolio levels. However, we find mixed results at the firm level.     

Public market staging: The timing of capital infusions in newly public firms

We examine financing activities of newly public firms for evidence on capital staging in the public equity market. Staging (sequential financing) can increase issuance costs but can limit costs associated with overinvestment. We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that staging is employed to help control the overinvestment problem in public firms. Initial public offering (IPO) proceeds, relative to external financing requirements, are smaller for firms with more intangible assets and more research and development (R&D)-intensive firms. Asset intangibility and R&D intensity are also both negatively related to the length of time from a firm's IPO to its first post-IPO capital infusion.     

Corporate capital structure and the characteristics of suppliers and customers

We investigate the link between a firm's leverage and the characteristics of its suppliers and customers. Specifically, we examine whether firms use decreased leverage as a commitment mechanism to induce suppliers/customers to undertake relationship-specific investments. We find that the firm's leverage is negatively related to the R&D intensities of its suppliers and customers. We also find lower debt levels for firms operating in industries in which strategic alliances and joint ventures with firms in supplier and customer industries are more prevalent. Consistent with a bargaining role for debt, we find a positive relation between firm debt level and the degree of concentration in supplier/customer industries.     

Estimating dynamic R&D choice: an analysis of costs and long‐run benefits

This article estimates a dynamic structural model of discrete Research and Development (R&D) investment and quantifies its cost and long‐run benefit for German manufacturing firms. The model incorporates linkages between R&D choice, product and process innovations, and future productivity and profits. The long‐run payoff to R&D is the proportional difference in expected firm value generated by the investment. It increases firm value by 6.7% for the median firm in high‐tech industries but only 2.8% in low‐tech industries. Simulations show that reductions in maintenance costs of innovation significantly raise investment rates and productivity, whereas reductions in startup costs have little effect.     

Have R&D Spillovers Declined in the 21st Century?

Slow growth over the last decade has prompted policy attention towards increasing R&D spending, often via the tax system. We examine the impact of R&D on firm performance, both by the firm's own investments and through positive (and negative) spillovers from other firms. We analyse panel data on US firms over the last three decades, and allow for time‐varying spillovers in both technology space (knowledge spillover) and product market space (product market rivalry). We show that the magnitude of R&D spillovers remains as large in the second decade of the 21^st century as it was in the mid 1980s. Since the ratio of the social return to the private return to R&D is about four to one, this implies that there remains a strong case for public support of R&D. Positive spillovers appeared to temporarily increase in the 1995–2004 digital technology boom. We also show how these micro estimates relate to estimates from the endogenous growth literature and give some suggestions for future work.     

Catastrophic Losses and Insurer Profitability: Evidence From 9/11

We examine the effects of 9/11 on the insurance industry, hypothesizing a short‐run claim effect, resulting from insufficient premium ex ante for catastrophic losses, and a long‐run growth effect, resulting from ex post insurance supply reductions and risk updating. Following Yoon and Starks (1995) we use short‐ and long‐run abnormal forecast revisions to measure both effects, analyzing them as a function of firm‐specific characteristics. We find that firm type, loss estimates, reinsurance use, and tax position are important determinants of the short‐run position. Firm type, loss estimates, financial strength, underwriting risk, and reinsurance are key determinants of the firm's long‐run position.     

The benefit of collective reputation

We study a model of reputation with two long‐lived firms who operate under a collective brand or as two individual brands. Firms' investments in quality are unobserved and can only be sustained through reputational concerns. In a collective brand, consumers cannot distinguish between the two firms. In the long run, this generates incentives to free‐ride on the other firm's investment, but in the short run, it mitigates the temptation to milk a good reputation. The signal structure and consumers' prior beliefs determine which effect dominates. We interpret our findings in light of the type of industry in which the firms operate.     

Capital Structure Swaps and Shareholder Wealth

We show how capital structure swaps can increase the wealth of a firm's long‐term shareholders when a firm's debt or equity is misvalued. We review the conventional rule that a firm should issue equity and use the proceeds to retire outstanding debt (an equity‐for‐debt swap) when equity is overvalued, or repurchase equity with proceeds of new debt (a debt‐for‐equity swap) when equity is undervalued. We also analyse the more complex case where a firm's debt and equity are both undervalued, showing the optimal swap may be to issue undervalued equity, contrary to the conventional rule.     

Diversification,Refocusing and Firm Value

At any point in time a firm faces three restructuring choices: diversify, refocus, or do nothing. This study analyses the causes and the consequences of these actions in a unified framework using the appropriate methodologies. Various factors, such as firm's characteristics and multinational nature, its industry's characteristics, its exchange and index inclusion, and divested (or acquired) segment(s)' industry conditions, are considered as the determinants of the diversifying and the refocusing decisions. The estimation results from the corresponding multinomial logit model suggest that refocusing occurs generally due to firm‐specific reasons, and diversification due to outside factors, such as industry and economic conditions. Added or dropped segment's industry profitability, its relationship to the core business of the firm, and its relatedness to the businesses of the conglomerate's other segments have a nontrivial effect on either decision. In a related analysis, the paper explicitly models and estimates the valuation consequences that are sustained by the firm after it undertakes a refocusing or a diversification action. To isolate the changes in firm's value that are due to these decisions only, a 2SLS estimation is used to control for endogeneity that arises because the factors that affect a firm's value are likely to have also induced the firm to make the corresponding decision. The novelty of my approach is in its inclusion of variables measuring the consequences due to both actions, the diversification and the refocusing, in the same valuation equation. Contrary to some earlier findings, I find no evidence of ‘diversification discount’ or ‘refocusing premium.’ The choice of this paper to analyse all corporate restructuring decisions in a unified framework yields valuable business insights into the reasons for undertaking such corporate events.     

CEO Overconfidence and Long‐Term Performance Following R&D Increases

We examine the relation between Chief Executive Officer (CEO) overconfidence and significant increases in research and development (R&D) expenditures. Although prior studies reveal a significantly positive market reaction to increases in R&D expenditures in both the long and short run, we find that long‐run stock performance is positive only for firms whose CEOs are not overconfident. Our findings, which may be attributable to overinvestment and the overestimation of future cash flows, imply that R&D resulting from overconfident behavior does not provide any value to firms.     

Measuring the Cost‐Effectiveness of an R&D Tax Credit for the UK

This paper investigates the economic impact of the government's proposed new UK R&D tax credit. We measure the benefit of the credit by the effect on value added in the short and long runs. This is simulated from existing econometric estimates of the tax‐price elasticity of research and development (R&D) and the effect of R&D on productivity. For the latter, we allow R&D to have an effect on technology transfer (catching up with the technological frontier) as well as innovation (pushing the frontier forward). We then compare the increase in value added to the likely exchequer costs of the programme under a number of scenarios. In the long run, the increase in GDP far outweighs the costs of the tax credit. The short‐run effect is far smaller, with value added only exceeding cost if R&D grows at or below the rate of inflation.     

Sharing Risk with the Government: How Taxes Affect Corporate Risk Taking

Using 113 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states, we provide evidence on how taxes affect corporate risk‐taking decisions. Higher taxes reduce expected profits more for risky projects than for safe ones, as the government shares in a firm's upside but not in its downside. Consistent with this prediction, we find that risk taking is sensitive to taxes, albeit asymmetrically: the average firm reduces risk in response to a tax increase (primarily by changing its operating cycle and reducing R&D risk) but does not respond to a tax cut. We trace the asymmetry back to constraints on risk taking imposed by creditors. Finally, tax loss‐offset rules moderate firms’ sensitivity to taxes by allowing firms to partly share downside risk with the government.     

Value chain capability,value strategies and firm default risk

Firm stakeholders are paying more attention to the firm risks rather than merely focusing on returns. Among those risks, a firm's ability to repay its debt increasingly becomes a yardstick to evaluate a firm and predict the security level of returning its borrowings. This situation is directly related to a firm's default risk. The current article links the firm's value strategies and capabilities to firm default risk reduction. Specifically, this article conceptualizes and operationalizes a new firm capability, value chain capability, and examines how this capability and two firm value strategies, R&D and advertising, reduce the firm's default risk. Meanwhile, the authors formulate the value chain capability's moderating effects on the relationships between the two value strategies and firm default risk. The findings suggest that value chain capability and advertising help the firm reduce default risk. R&D will have the same effect only when a firm has high value chain capability.     

The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm

Four key ideas provide the foundation for the pragmatic theory of the firm, which is expecially useful for managements and boards in developing an understanding of how companies create long‐term value for the benefit of all stakeholders. First, and a necessary point of departure, is clarity about the purpose of the firm. Maximizing shareholder value is viewed not as the social purpose of the firm, but as a consequence of a company's effectiveness in carrying out a purpose that recognizes the benefits of success to all key corporate stakeholders. Second, a company's knowledge‐building proficiency, in relation to that of its competitors, is viewed as the primary determinant of its long‐term performance. Nurturing and sustaining a knowledge‐building culture facilitates the discovery of obsolete assumptions and early adaptation to a changing environment. Third, the theory avoids “compartmentalizing” a company's activities into silos by treating the firm as a holistic system. A key component of the theory that quantifies corporate performance is the life‐cycle framework in which economic returns exhibit “competitive fade” over the long term. This holistic way of thinking provides insights about intangible assets and other sources of excess shareholder returns. Fourth, managing corporate risk should focus on identifying and removing all major obstacles to achieving the firm's purpose. Such obstacles can lead to value destruction through, for example, unethical behavior and all forms of shortsighted failure to recognize and make the most of opportunities to increase long‐run productivity and value. This theory of the firm is pragmatic in the sense that it aims to produce insights about a company's (or business unit's) performance that can improve management's decisions, especially in allocating capital and other corporate resources. The author uses John Deere's life‐cycle track record over the past 60 years to illustrate a successful application of the theory.     

Mandatory and Voluntary Disclosures: Dynamic Interactions

Firms sometimes obtain soft private information about growth prospects along with hard information about current or past performance. In this environment, we find that optimizing disclosures over multiple periods yields nonlinear stock price reactions following both voluntary and mandatory disclosures. Further, we derive several predictions about distinct short‐run and long‐run effects of disclosures and nondisclosures on security prices. Under specified conditions, when the volatility of the firm's earnings increases, the average contemporaneous and prospective post‐mandatory‐disclosure market premia (for voluntary disclosures over nondisclosures) rise, while farther‐in‐future market discounts (for such voluntary disclosures) also become larger. Our analysis moreover predicts that both the disclosure probability and the information content of nondisclosures can increase in the persistence of earnings.     

Blockholder Trading,Market Efficiency,and Managerial Myopia

This paper analyzes how blockholders can exert governance even if they cannot intervene in a firm's operations. Blockholders have strong incentives to monitor the firm's fundamental value because they can sell their stakes upon negative information. By trading on private information (following the “Wall Street Rule”), they cause prices to reflect fundamental value rather than current earnings. This in turn encourages managers to invest for long‐run growth rather than short‐term profits. Contrary to the view that the U.S.'s liquid markets and transient shareholders exacerbate myopia, I show that they can encourage investment by impounding its effects into prices.     

CONVERTIBLE DEBT AND RISK‐SHIFTING INCENTIVES

I argue that convertible debt, in contrast to its perceived role, can produce shareholders’ risk‐shifting incentives. When a firm's capital structure includes convertible debt, every investment decision affects not only the distribution of the asset value but also the likelihood that the debt will be converted and thereby the distribution of the firm's leverage. This suggests that managers can engage in risk‐increasing projects if a higher asset risk generates a more favorable distribution of leverage. Empirical evidence using 30 years of data supports my argument.     

Valuation of Corporate Innovation and the Pricing of Risk in the Biopharmaceutical Industry: The Case of Gilead

Much of a firm's market value derives from expected future growth value rather than from the value of current operations or assets in place. Pharmaceutical companies are good examples of firms where much market value comes from expectations about drugs still in the development “pipeline.” Using a new osteoporosis drug being developed by Gilead Sciences, Inc., the author combines discounted cash flow methods values and real option models to value it. Alone, discounted cash flow (DCF) calculations are vulnerable to the assumptions of growth, cost of capital, and cash flows. But by integrating the real options approach with the DCF technique, one can value a new product in the highly regulated, risky and research‐intensive Biopharmaceutical industry. This article shows how to value a Biopharmaceutical product, tracked from discovery to market launch in a step‐by‐step manner. Improving over early real option models, this framework explicitly captures competition, speed of innovation, risk, financing need, the size of the market potential in valuing corporate innovation using a firm‐specific measure of risk and the industry‐wide value of growth operating cash flows. This framework shows how the risk of corporate innovation, which is not fully captured by the standard valuation models, is priced into the value of a firm's growth opportunity. The DCF approach permits top‐down estimation of the size of the industry‐wide growth opportunity that competing firms must race to capture, while the contingency‐claims technique allows bottom‐up incorporation of the firm's successful R&D investment and the timing of introduction of the new product to market. It also specifically prices the risk of innovation by modeling its two components: the consumer validation of technology and the expert validation of technology. Overall, it estimates the value contribution per share of a new product for the firm.     

INDUSTRY EFFECTS OF ANALYST STOCK REVISIONS

We examine the industry valuation effects of analyst stock revisions and identify the variables that influence these effects. Our results show that industry rivals experience significant abnormal returns in response to revision announcements. Although the mean stock price response suggests contagion effects, there is also evidence of significant competitive effects. The valuation effects are influenced by the magnitude of the rated firm's announcement return, along with analyst‐specific and industry‐specific characteristics. However, the sensitivity of the valuation effects to these characteristics is conditioned on whether the industry effects are contagious or competitive.