折旧方法、心理感知和资本投资决策研究

本文采用模拟实验的方式通过问卷调查研究企业折旧方法、心理感知和管理者资本投资决策的关系机理。为此,进行了如下试验：管理者必须决定是继续使用现有的资产还是重置资产。研究结果表明：一、固定资产采取直线折旧法比采用加速折旧法被重置的可能性要小些。二、使用直线法折旧的资产比使用加速法折旧的资产所提供的追溯效用要小。三,由折旧方法引起的管理者追溯效用感知差异影响他们的预期效用感知,进而影响管理者的资产重置决策,心理感知在折旧方法和资本投资决策之间起部分中介作用。     

Shareholder governance, bondholder governance, and managerial risk-taking

We examine the relation between the overall corporate governance structure and managerial risk-taking behavior. We find that the overall governance structure has a significant impact on how managers make decisions on investment policy: strong bondholder governance motivates more low-risk investments such as capital expenditure and lower high-risk investments such as R&D expenditures, whereas weak shareholder governance (entrenched managers) leads to more R&D expenditures. Moreover, we find that the effects of governance on investment policy differ significantly between speculative and investment-grade firms. For speculative firms, strong bondholder or shareholder governance leads to more capital expenditures and low R&D investments. For investment-grade firms, strong bondholder or shareholder governance leads to low capital expenditures and an insignificant impact on R&D investments. Furthermore, financing and investment covenants exhibit strong binding power to deter risky investments. Finally, a more dependent (or a less independent) board is associated with low capital expenditures and high R&D investments.     

Investment Decisions in Anticipation of Recessions and Outperformance of Pre-Acting Firms

We empirically examine whether firms make investment decisions in anticipation of recessions and subsequently perform better. Using a large quarterly dataset of fixed asset investments for U.S. firms during 1984–2012, we show that not all firms efficiently adjust their investment decisions in anticipation of a recession. However, we find that pre-acting firms that properly adjust their investment decisions (i.e., underinvest) before a recession outperform re-acting firms that fail to make proper investment decisions (i.e., overinvest) before a recession in subsequent returns on assets, returns on investments, and market-adjusted return measures.     

Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy

We examine in this paper how certain instruments link science and the economy through acting on capital budgeting decisions, and in doing so how they contribute to the process of making markets. We use the term “mediating instruments” to refer to those practices that frame the capital spending decisions of individual firms and agencies, and that help to align them with investments made by other firms and agencies in the same or related industries. Our substantive focus is on the microprocessor industry, and the roles of “Moore’s Law” and “technology roadmaps”. We examine the ways in which these instruments envision a future, and how they link a multitude of actors and domains in such a way that the making of future markets for microprocessors and related devices can continue. The paper begins with a discussion of existing literatures on capital budgeting, science studies, and recent economic sociology, together with the reasoning behind the notion of “mediating instruments”. We then address the substantive issues in three stages. Firstly, we consider the role of “Moore’s Law” in shaping the fundamental expectations of an entire set of industries about rates of increase in the power and complexity of semiconductor devices, and the timing of those increases. Secondly, we examine the roles of “technology roadmaps” in translating the simplified imperatives of Moore’s Law into a framework that can guide and encourage the myriad of highly uncertain and confidential investment decisions of firms and other agencies. Thirdly, we explore one particular and recent example of major capital investment, that of post-optical lithography. The paper seeks to help remedy the empirical deficit in studies of capital budgeting practices, and to demonstrate that investment is much more than a matter of valuation techniques. We argue, through the case of the microprocessor industry, for greater attention to investment as an inter-firm and inter-agency process, thus lessening the fixation in studies of capital budgeting on the traditional hierarchical and bounded organization. In addition, we seek to extend and illustrate empirically the richness of the notion of “mediating instruments” for researchers in accounting, science studies, and economic sociology.     

Evidence on the Usefulness of Capital Expenditures as an Alternative Measure of Depreciation

Investment professionals often suggest that accounting earnings is a more useful indicator of share value if adjusted by substituting current capital expenditures for reported depreciation. We investigate the usefulness of this alternative depreciation measure by comparing the ability of reported earnings and adjusted earnings to explain the cross-sectional distribution of stock prices for a large sample of manufacturing firms. We find that adjusted earnings explains a much smaller fraction of the variation in share prices than earnings based on reported depreciation, and provide evidence on the reasons for this difference.     

Investor Protection,Investment Efficiency and Value: The Case of Cross‐Listed Firms

We examine the impact of improved investor protection due to cross‐listing on foreign firms’ investment decisions and firm value. While we find that cross‐listing increases firms’ capital expenditures and mergers and acquisitions activities, cross‐listed firms also invest more in research and development, make better acquisition decisions, and have higher profitability compared to non‐cross‐listed firms. Moreover, cross‐listing is associated with better cash utilization by foreign firms for investments. These improvements in investments and cash utilization are more pronounced for firms cross‐listed on US exchanges and for firms from countries with weak investor protection laws.     

Do financial factors affect the capital–labour ratio? Evidence from UK firm-level data

This paper analyses how firms’ capital–labour ratio is affected by cash flow, leverage, and collateral, and how this effect differs at firms more and less likely to face financing constraints using a rich UK firm-level data set. It is common in the literature to examine the impact of financial constraints on hiring and firing decisions separately from their impact on decisions related to investment in physical capital. We argue that as long as firms use both inputs in production and there is some substitutability between them, the two decisions need to be jointly analysed. When we differentiate across firms that are more or less financially constrained, we find that the former group exhibits higher sensitivities of the capital–labour ratio to firm-specific characteristics compared to the latter.     

Does favorable investor sentiment lead to costly decisions to go public?

We investigate the real effects of decisions to undertake an initial public offering of stock in periods of favorable investor sentiment. Specifically, we examine potential effects of favorable investor sentiment on investment expenditures and how effects on investment affect firm operating performance and value as well as the likelihood of survival. We find that firms going public during periods of favorable sentiment, on average, spend substantially more on investments, especially acquisitions, than firms going public in other periods. The effect of favorable investor sentiment on investment is more pronounced for younger firms. We do not find, however, that the higher investment spending in the wake of favorable sentiment leads to worse operating or stock performance. Stock returns around acquisitions announcements are also positive for firms going public in favorable sentiment periods. The preponderance of our findings indicate that decisions to go public in favorable investor sentiment periods do not lead to corporate investment decisions that harm firm performance and value.     

Managerial conservatism and corporate policies

This paper investigates how conservative managers make corporate decisions. Motivated by psychology research, we use handwritten signatures (i.e., emotionally restraint disclosure styles) as a proxy for CEO conservatism. We find that firms with conservative CEOs engage more with safer investments (capital expenditures), engage less with risky policies (Research & Development expenses and debt financing), hold more cash, are less likely to pay cash dividends, and more likely to use stock repurchase schemes. We use the same proxy for CFO conservatism. We find that CFO conservatism is a better determinant than CEO conservatism for cash holding and financing policies, but the reverse is true for investment policies. Conservative CFOs prefer long-term debt to short-term debt.     

Earnings Quality Based on Corporate Investment Decisions

In this paper, I examine a new approach for measuring earnings quality, defined as the closeness of reported earnings to “permanent earnings,” based on firm decisions with regard to capital and labor investments. Specifically, I measure earnings quality as the contemporaneous association between changes in the levels of capital and labor investment and the change in reported earnings. This approach follows the reasoning that (1) firms make investment decisions based on the net present value (NPV) of investment projects and (2) reported earnings with higher quality should more closely associate with real investment decisions. I find that measures of earnings quality based on managerial labor and capital decisions correlate positively with earnings persistence and have incremental explanatory power relative to earnings‐quality measures used in the accounting literature. Furthermore, investment‐based earnings‐quality measures are less informative when managers tend to overinvest.     

The Wealth Effects of Capital Investment Decisions: An Empirical Comparison of Korean Chaebol and Non‐Chaebol Firms

Abstract:   This paper investigates the capital investment decisions of Korean firms and their impact on shareholder wealth. Overall, we find positive abnormal returns surrounding the announcements of 697 cases of investment projects during the period 1992–1999. This paper also finds that the investment decisions of business group ( chaebol ‐affiliated) firms do not increase shareholder wealth, while the capital investment decisions of non‐ chaebol firms generate significantly positive abnormal returns. The multivariate tests provide consistent evidence that the announcement effects for chaebol firms are lower than for non‐ chaebol firms, after growth opportunities, investment size and firm size are controlled for. The findings support the view that the organizational structure of Korean chaebols creates an incentive for managers to make non‐value maximizing capital investment decisions.     

Cash, investments and asset returns

We use an investment-based asset pricing model to examine the effect of firms’ investments relative to cash holdings on stock returns, assuming holding cash lowers transaction costs. We find that mimicking portfolios based on investments relative to non-cash capital and based on investments relative to cash capital are priced for various testing portfolios. On average, momentum stocks and growth stocks are more sensitive to the factor constructed using investment relative to cash.     

Do Private Firms Invest Differently than Public Firms? Taking Cues from the Natural Gas Industry

We study how listing status affects investment behavior. Theory offers competing hypotheses on how listing‐related frictions affect investment decisions. We use detailed data on 74,670 individual projects in the U.S. natural gas industry to show that private firms respond less than public firms to changes in investment opportunities. Private firms adjust drilling activity for low capital‐intensity investments. However, they do not increase drilling in response to new capital‐intensive growth opportunities. Instead, they sell these projects to public firms. Our evidence suggests that differences in access to external capital are important in explaining the investment behavior of public and private firms.     

Early indicators of fundraising success by venture capital firms

We show how a venture capital firm's fundraising is affected by its investment choices. We investigate three leading indicators that are calculated from the types of investments the venture capital firms make: style drift investments, follow-on investments, and investments in which the venture capital firm is not the lead investor in the portfolio company. We find that these investment characteristics are associated with lower fundraising. Characteristics and the reaction of fundraising to characteristics are both moderately stable through time. We also find some evidence that information about investment characteristics is more important for fundraising during bad states of the world and that ex-ante characteristics are related to eventual exit outcomes and financial performance.     

How Firms Make Capital Expenditure Decisions: Financial Signals, Internal Cash Flows, Income Taxes and the Tax Reform Act of 1986

This paper empirically assesses the determinants of future net capital expenditures for a broad cross-section of COMPUSTAT firms from 1973 to 1989. We explore three general categories of factors expected to affect investment: (1) external equity financing, (2) internally generated accounting information, and (3) tax incentives. We find that external financing and information plays a role in that both positive stock returns and equity issuances indicate future increases in investment. The results suggest that high stock prices not only lower the cost of capital, but also signal good investment opportunities. Accounting information about internal sources and uses of funds are also important in the investment decision. In particular, net income and depreciation are positive indicators of future investment while there is a tradeoff between the payment of dividends and investment. Further, positive changes in available cash liquidity also motivate future investment. While taxes are not important in the investment decision on average, we find that firms with previously higher income taxes invested substantially more in 1985 and 1986. This coincides with the repeal of the investment tax credit and the accelerated depreciation schedules in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. We view this as evidence that federal tax policy in the 1980's induced firms with high income tax obligations to accelerate capital expenditures just before the favorable tax treatment of capital expenditures was eliminated.     

Is heterogeneous capital depreciation important for estimating firm-level productivity? Evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

This paper contributes to the existing literature on estimating firm-level production functions. Using Chinese manufacturing survey data, we employ the firm-level heterogeneous capital depreciation rate to measure firms’ investment and assess its role using Olley and Pakes (1996) (OP) production function estimation technique. Although there is some ongoing debate on the econometric soundness of the OP technique, we argue quantitatively that the heterogeneous depreciation rate muffles the measurement error associated with the key input demand investment. In our sample, it significantly narrows the gap of total factor productivity (TFP) estimates between the OP technique and a state-of-the-art estimation method that works without investment. We further reveal that the improved performance primarily originates from the dynamic evolution in the distribution of the capital depreciation rate.     

Explaining Underutilization of Tax Depreciation Deductions: Empirical Evidence from Norway

Many corporations do not claim all of their allowable tax depreciation deductions. Intuitively, this kind of behavior might seem odd. However we propose several possible explanations. First, we find strong evidence that firms facing current tax losses or carrying forward past losses underutilize depreciation in order to recover tax losses before they expire. Second, corporations with bad economic performance tend to underutilize their deductions, suggesting that corporations use costly windowdressing on their accounting measures. Third, we find support for the hypothesis that tax compliance costs discourage the utilization of accelerated depreciation, especially by small firms. We do not find much support for other hypotheses. For example, we find no evidence of substitution between tax depreciation and private debt due to competition between the benefits of private bank monitoring and the tax savings from using tax allowances to postpone tax payments, as suggested in earlier literature. We also study the effects of the uniform reporting accounting system (typical of many European countries) which can, under certain circumstances, constrain dividends. Forgoing some tax depreciation can loosen the dividend constraint, but the evidence does not support this motivation. Unusual access to extremely detailed individual firm tax return forms in Norway made our empirical analysis possible. In addition, the 1992 Norwegian tax reform provided a natural experiment for testing some of the hypotheses. We use the time-series and cross-sectional variation across Norwegian corporations in 1988, 1991, 1992 and 1993.     

Corporate capital budgeting and CEO turnover

When a firm has minimal agency and informational asymmetry problems it should make efficient capital budgeting decisions. Many firms over-invest prior to CEO turnover, halt investments in the period surrounding the turnover, and then greatly increase their level of expenditures. Empirical analysis of the cross-sectional and inter-temporal variation in the quality of firms' corporate capital budgeting decision reveals that the impact of CEO turnover is asymmetric between under- and over-investing firms, and this complements the larger literature using average firm-wide performance measures. Firms are more likely to have forced turnovers when there is more over-investment prior to the turnover, and these firms make more efficient investment decisions subsequently. Board influence is largely insignificant prior to a CEO turnover but is consistently associated with higher levels of investment subsequently.     

Capital budgeting using residual income maximization

This analysis provides theoretical support for the use of residual income. Economic theory states that capital investment should maximize the present value of incremental cash flow. When a firm is decentralized, coordinating the necessary information to determine optimal investment in the short run may be impossible. But the residual income maximizing choice can be coordinated using a simple transfer-pricing system. Under appropriate capitalization and depreciation policies, the residual-income maximization policy leads the firm to make suboptimal short-run investment decisions, yet these decisions still lead the firm to its long-run, presentvalue-maximizing capacity level.Funding for this study was provided by grants from the Arthur Andersen & Co. Foundation and the National Science Foundation.