Pension roulette: have you bet too much on equities?

In the 1990s, funding pension obligations by investing in stocks looked smart. By 1999, the bull market had poured a collective $260 billion surplus into the pension coffers of the S&P 500, permitting the companies to record the year-to-year increases as additional income. But just two years later, the bear market had obliterated those gains, replacing them with a cavernous $240 billion deficit--which had to be offset by the unlucky firms' ongoing cash flows, wreaking havoc on their earnings, debt levels, and stock prices. Corporate executives may be blamed for this debacle. But they were only following the rules. Current accounting guidelines keep companies from recording pension liabilities and assets on their balance sheets, instead relegating them to the footnotes. That makes it hard to see the risk that market drops expose companies to. Board members and top executives need to look beyond distorted accounting numbers to the economic realities of pension plans. Once they do, they may be surprised to find that they would gain far greater value and flexibility by passively investing their pension funds entirely in bonds. A bond portfolio can be designed to meet precisely, and with virtual certainty, a company's pension obligation, thus eliminating the chance of a funding gap. The predictability of bond investments also stabilizes earnings and cash flow. The expanded corporate debt capacity that results can then be used to fuel growth or reduce the firm's overall cost of capital. Even without an overhaul of today's misguided accounting rules, there's little reason for companies' pension funds to hold anything other than bonds.     

From Stock Selection to Portfolio Alpha Generation: The Role of Fundamental Analysis

In this roundtable sponsored by Columbia Business School's Center for Excellence in Accounting Research and Security Analysis, a group of successful investors discuss their approaches and methods. A common saying among financial economists is that stock prices are set not by the average investor, but “at the margin” by the most sophisticated and influential investors. The intent of this roundtable is to furnish a portrait of such “marginal” investors, one that turns out to be quite different from the quarterly earnings‐driven, momentum traders often depicted by the media and deplored by corporate executives. In response to the common charge of short termism leveled by corporate managers, most of the investors at the table claimed to take large, multi‐year positions in companies they believed to be well‐managed, but temporarily undervalued. Instead of being attracted to earnings momentum, and rather than simply capitalizing current earnings at industry‐wide multiples to arrive at price targets, the analysis of these investors begins with a “deep dive” into a company's financials, which is often reinforced by primary research—visits with management, customers, suppliers. The aim of such research is to identify, well before the broad market does, companies that promise to earn consistently high and sustainable returns on invested capital.     

Just Say No to Wall Street: Putting a Stop to the Earnings Game

CEOs and CFOs put themselves in a bind by providing earnings guidance and then making decisions designed to meet Wall Street's expectations for quarterly earnings. When earnings appear to be coming in short of projections, top managers often react by suggesting or demanding that middle and lower level managers redo their forecasts, plans, and budgets. In some cases, top executives simply acquiesce to increasingly unrealistic analyst forecasts and adopt them as the basis for setting organizational goals and developing internal budgets. But in cases where external expectations are impossible to meet, either approach sets up the firm and its managers for failure.
Using the experiences of several companies, the authors illustrate the dangers of conforming to market pressures for unrealistic growth targets. They argue that an overvalued stock, by encouraging overpriced acquisitions and other risky, value-destroying bets, can be as damaging to the long-run health of a company as an undervalued stock.
Putting an end to the "earnings game" requires that CEOs reclaim the initiative by avoiding earnings guidance and managing expectations in such a way that their stocks trade reasonably close to their intrinsic value. In place of earnings forecasts, management should provide information about the company's strategic goals and main value drivers. They should also talk about the risks associated with the strategies, and management's plans to deal with them.     

个人大股东持股与股价暴跌风险

本文以2007至2016年中国A股上市公司为样本,考察了个人大股东持股与股价暴跌风险之间的关系。研究发现:第一,个人大股东持股比例的增加能够显著降低公司未来股价暴跌风险。这一结论在剔除了个人大股东中董监高持股数量、进行内生性处理、更换不同统计检验方法后依然成立。第二,个人大股东持股对公司管理层监督的效果并不明显,个人大股东持股比例的增加对于公司应计盈余管理、真实盈余管理、投资效率、过度投资等可能影响公司股价暴跌风险的经营指标并没有显著影响。第三,个人大股东的持股加强了公司股权制衡的力度,进而显著降低了公司股价暴跌风险。股权制衡机制解释了大股东持股对股价暴跌风险一半以上的影响。本文的研究对于全面认识个人大股东在资本市场中发挥的作用,促进股市平稳发展具有重要的理论和现实意义。     

The value relevance of timely information: The case of comparable store sales growth

Investors and analysts have called for more timely disclosure of corporate information. Responding to these demands, some retail firms issue comparable store sales (CSS) on a monthly or a quarterly basis in addition to an annual basis. This study examines whether a timely disclosure of CSS provides value-relevant information to market participants by examining investors' and financial analysts' responses at the time of CSS disclosures (short-horizon) and over the month or the quarter (long-horizon). We find that both monthly and quarterly CSS are associated with contemporaneous market returns and analyst forecast revisions. More importantly, we find that quarterly CSS news becomes less important to investors when firms provide more timely CSS information, indicating that monthly CSS reports may preempt the information content of quarterly CSS. Additional tests show that investors and analysts rely less on CSS if CSS news and earnings (sales) news are inconsistent.     

Insider trading,future earnings,and post-earnings announcement drift

This paper examines the association between insider trading prior to quarterly earnings announcements and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We conjecture and find that insider trades reflect insiders’ private information about the persistence of earnings news. Thus, insider trades can help investors better understand and incorporate the time-series properties of quarterly earnings into stock prices in a timely and unbiased manner, thereby mitigating PEAD. As predicted, PEAD is significantly lower when earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading. The reduction in PEAD is driven by contradictory insider trades (i.e., net buys before large negative earnings news or net sells before large positive earnings news) and is more pronounced in the presence of more sophisticated market participants. Consistent with investors extracting and trading on insiders’ private information, pre-announcement insider trading is associated with smaller market reactions to future earnings news in each of the four subsequent quarters. Overall, our findings indicate insider trading contributes to stock price efficiency by conveying insiders’ private information about future earnings and especially the persistence of earnings news.     

Trading based on forecasts of earnings per share: A test of the efficient market hypothesis

In this paper the semi-strong form of the efficient market hypothesis is tested with a trading rule based on Box-Jenkins forecasts of earnings per share numbers. The quarterly earnings per share series are modeled for a number of firms. The models are updated quarter by quarter and investments are made in the stocks with the largest forecasted growth rates for the next quarter. The risk-adjusted performance of such a strategy is shown to be inconsistant with semi-strong market efficiency.     

The effect of quarterly earnings guidance on share values in corporate acquisitions

We investigate whether quarterly earnings guidance by corporate takeover targets is associated with acquisition premiums. Regulators have expressed recurring concerns that quarterly guidance is associated with a misallocation of resources because it encourages management to focus on excessively short-term horizons. If so, firms providing quarterly guidance represent an acquisition opportunity for non-guiding firms because acquired resources can be redeployed towards more productive long-term uses. Based on prior research that finds value created by acquisitions accrues primarily to target shareholders, we predict that an expected increase in value from the termination of guidance will be observed in acquisition premiums. We find that, after controlling for the other determinants of acquisition gains, the premium paid for an acquired corporation is associated with the target's practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance. Consistent with our prediction, we find that no incremental premium is paid to acquire guiding targets when the bidding firm also provides guidance.     

Financial Management Association Roundtable on Stock Market Pricing and Value‐Based Management

A group of academics and practitioners addresses a number of questions about the workings of the stock market and its implications for corporate decision‐making. The discussion begins by asking what the market wants from companies: Is it mainly just steady increases in earnings per share, which are then “capitalized” by the market at the current industry P/E multiple to produce a higher stock price? Or does the market pay attention to the “quality,” or sustainability, of earnings? And are there more revealing measures of annual corporate performance than GAAP earnings—measures that would provide investors with a better sense of companies' future cash‐generating capacity and returns on capital? The consensus was that although many investors respond uncritically to earnings numbers, the most sophisticated and influential investors consider far more than current earnings when pricing stocks. And although the stock market is far from omniscient, the heightened scrutiny of companies resulting from the growth of hedge funds, private equity, and investor activism of all kinds appears to be making the market “more efficient” in building information into stock prices. The second part of the discussion explored the implications of this view of the market pricing process for corporate strategy and the evaluation of major investment opportunities. For example, do acquisitions have to be “EPS‐accretive” to be value‐adding, or is there a more reliable means of assessing an investment's value added than pro forma EPS effects? Does the DCF valuation method always offer a better guide to value than the method of comparables used by many Wall Street dealmakers? And under what circumstances are the relatively new real options valuation approaches likely to provide a significant advantage over conventional methods? The main message offered to corporate practitioners is to avoid letting cosmetic accounting effects get in the way of value‐adding investment and operating decisions. As the corporate record on acquisitions makes painfully clear, there is no guarantee that an accretive deal will turn out to be value‐increasing (in fact, the odds are that it will not). As for choosing a valuation method, there appears to be a time and place for each of the major methods—comparables, DCF, and real options—and the key to success is understanding which method is best suited to the circumstances.     

Linear Information Dynamics,Dividend Irrelevance,Corporate Valuation and the Clean Surplus Relationship

This paper adopts the linear information dynamics framework pioneered in Ohlson (1979) and Garman and Ohlson (1980) (and subsequently used in, in particular, Ohlson, 1989, 1995 and Feltham and Ohlson, 1995) for thinking about desirable properties of earnings numbers in the context of the market valuation of firms, where such valuations are fundamentally based on expected future dividends. The first purpose of this paper is to consider the valuation-relevance of clean surplus earnings when there are two distinct components of clean surplus earnings whose evolutions are governed, along with book value and dividends, by a system of linear information dynamics, and dividend irrelevancy holds. The system of linear information dynamics assumed ensures that corporate value is a linear combination of the two components of clean surplus earnings, book value and dividends. One question becomes—under what circumstances are clean surplus earnings (combined with book value and dividends) sufficient for corporate valuation without a knowledge of the breakdown of clean surplus earnings into its separate components? This paper develops the conditions defining these circumstances. At the other extreme, another question can be asked—under what circumstances is one component of clean surplus earnings irrelevant to corporate valuation? This paper identifies some conditions that identify these latter circumstances. The second purpose of the paper is to identify implications of these results for both the traditional arguments about the desirability of measuring earnings on a clean surplus basis and also the more contemporary issues surrounding FRS3. A third purpose is to discuss the implications of the overall analysis for the empirical testing of the relationship between market prices and earnings numbers, and for empirically-justified definitions of maintainable earnings.     

我国上市公司盈余管理对股价影响的实证分析

盈余管理在西方被称为“市场参与者的游戏”，近年来日益受到我国会计学界的关注。证券市场的迅速发展要求上市公司提供高质量的会计信息，由于盈余管理与会计信息质量关系密切，使得对上市公司盈余管理问题的研究成为投资者、债权人、政府主管部门以及会计准则制定机构关注的重点。另一方面，证券市场经验数据证明，股价的波动也同盈余管理密切相关，而利益相关者很可能利用盈余管理手段来影响股价从而获取利益。因此，加强我国上市公司盈余管理和股价相关性的研究，对提高上市公司会计信息质量和改善证券市场资源优化配置功能有着重要意义。本文运用实证分析方法，选取了竞争性强的家电行业和竞争性弱的石油行业的上市公司，从盈余管理度量着手，研究竞争性不同行业的上市公司盈余管理对股价的影响大小，并对投资者的行为提出相关建议。     

Three Common Misconceptions About Markets (or Why Earnings Smoothing,Guidance, and Concern About Meeting Consensus Estimates are Likely to be Counterproductive)

Although many executives strive for stable earnings growth, finance theory and research have long suggested that the most sophisticated investors aren't especially concerned about “normal” levels of variability in reported earnings. More recent research by the authors and their McKinsey colleagues also suggests that extraordinary efforts to achieve steady growth in earnings per share quarter after quarter aren't worthwhile and may actually hurt the companies that undertake them. While such efforts to smooth earnings involve real costs, the research finds no meaningful relationship between earnings variability and valuation multiples or shareholder returns. Based on these findings, as well as considerable experience in advising companies, the authors offer the following advice to senior executives:

• Managers shouldn't shape their earnings targets or budgets just to meet consensus estimates. Companies that reduce spending on product development, sales and marketing, or other contributors to long‐term growth are sacrificing long‐term performance for the appearance of short‐term strength.
• As the year progresses, managers should likewise avoid costly, shortsighted actions to meet the consensus. Resist the temptation to offer customers end‐of‐year discounts to boost current‐year sales, or to resort to creative accounting with accruals. Investors recognize these for what they are: borrowing from next year's earnings.

Finally, companies should reconsider the practice of quarterly earnings guidance. Instead of providing frequent earnings guidance, companies should design their investor communication policies to help the market to understand their strategy, the underlying value drivers of their business, and the most important risks associated with the business—in short, to understand the long‐term health and value of the enterprise.     

How Much New Information Is There in Earnings?

We quantify the relative importance of earnings announcements in providing new information to the share market, using the R² in a regression of securities' calendar‐year returns on their four quarterly earnings‐announcement “window” returns. The R², which averages approximately 5% to 9%, measures the proportion of total information incorporated in share prices annually that is associated with earnings announcements. We conclude that the average quarterly announcement is associated with approximately 1% to 2% of total annual information, thus providing a modest but not overwhelming amount of incremental information to the market. The results are consistent with the view that the primary economic role of reported earnings is not to provide timely new information to the share market. By inference, that role lies elsewhere, for example, in settling debt and compensation contracts and in disciplining prior information, including more timely managerial disclosures of information originating in the firm's accounting system. The relative informativeness of earnings announcements is a concave function of size. Increased information during earnings‐announcement windows in recent years is due only in part to increased concurrent releases of management forecasts. There is no evidence of abnormal information arrival in the weeks surrounding earnings announcements. Substantial information is released in management forecasts and in analyst forecast revisions prior (but not subsequent) to earnings announcements.     

SHAREHOLDER WEALTH EFFECTS OF MANAGEMENT CHANGES

This paper analyzes the direction and magnitude of changes in stock prices resulting from the announcement of various types of changes in senior corporate management over a twelve-year period. We find support for the view that instability resulting from executive succession adversely affects organizational performance. Furthermore, our results imply a clear preference by the market for a change in composition of the previous management team over its further entrenchment and a perception by the market that senior corporate executives and the board of directors may not be solely motivated by considerations of shareholder wealth maximization.     

Driving Performance Through Corporate Culture: Interviews with Four Experts

Establishing an effective link between corporate strategy and employee performance has traditionally been seen as a function of organizational structure and internal marketing—that is, of getting the right compensation systems in place to reward the desired behavior, and relentlessly communicating the strategy to all employees. But, according to the four organizational behavior experts who were interviewed for this article, there's more to it than that. Also important is a market- and customer-oriented corporate culture, which can be a highly effective tool for companies seeking to improve performance and increase value.
This article presents four distinctive, but complementary views on why and how senior executives should play a significant role in managing the cultures within their organizations. According to these experts, it is possible to both transform and harness the power of a culture by paying greater attention to succession issues; articulating and communicating an organization's core values; aligning a company's behavioral norms with employee assumptions; and offering "constructive reconciliation of cultural differences." In the last analysis, a company's culture is said to be the most effective way for executives to ensure that their employees will perform "when no one is looking."     

More than words: Can tone of consumer product reviews help predict firms’ fundamentals?

Although financial market participants are increasingly interested in the financial value of unstructured qualitative information regarding the prospects of a firm, empirical evidence remains sparse on the properties of qualitative content in consumer product reviews and their capital market implications. Using a broad sample of consumer reviews posted on Amazon.com, I examine whether the linguistic tone of aggregate consumer product reviews conveys information that is associated with firms’ sales, earnings, stock returns and risk. I find that aggregate review tone successfully predicts a firm's forthcoming quarterly sales. Moderating analyses show that this predictability is stronger for firms operating in a highly competitive environment. I further find that review tone predicts a firm's quarterly earnings surprises, abnormal stock returns and risk. A path analysis shows that the effect of review tone on stock prices is partially channeled through its effect on firms’ earnings. I finally find that negative review tone is more informative and useful than positive tone in predicting a firm's fundamentals. Importantly, these results hold after controlling for other review characteristics, including review rating, review volumeand review dispersion. Overall, my findings highlight the importance of considering the tone of consumer reviews when evaluating a firm's prospects and value.     

Does good corporate governance reduce information asymmetry around quarterly earnings announcements?

We examine the relationship between the quality of corporate governance and information asymmetry in the equity market around quarterly earnings announcements. We use the change in market liquidity (i.e., bid–ask spreads and depths) around the announcements as a proxy for information asymmetry. We use principal components analysis to identify three factors, board independence, board structure and board activity, that capture the information in the eight individual corporate governance variables we examine. We then use ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares to estimate the relations between market liquidity changes and the following four explanatory variables: directors’ and officers’ percentage stock holdings, board independence, board structure, and board activity. Our results indicate that changes in bid–ask spreads at the time of earnings announcements are significantly negatively related to board independence, board activity, and the percentage stock holdings of directors and officers. We also find that depth changes are significantly positively related to board structure, board activity, and directors’ and officers’ percentage stock holdings. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that firms with higher levels of corporate governance have lower information asymmetry around quarterly earnings announcements.     

Managerial incentives for attracting attention

This paper studies the mechanisms which motivate managers to engage in cheap talk and attract the market's attention in a credible way. We consider stock split announcements, voluntary earnings forecasts, and press releases issued by firms to the media as proxies for managerial cheap talk. We show that: (a) managerial performance‐related pay contracts incentivize executives to attract attention; (b) analysts increase their coverage of firms following cheap talk; and (c) chief executive officers are punished for attracting attention when market prices do not increase following cheap talk. The results are stronger for firms which are most in need of attention.     

The information content of security prices

The study derives a relationship between prices changes and earnings changes by expanding the information upon which earnings expectations are conditioned to include data other than prior earnings history. In particular, price is used as a surrogate for additional information available to market participants. This relationship provides an interpretation of the contemporaneous association between price changes and earnings changes previously observed by Ball and Brown (1968) and Beaver, Clarke and Wright (1979), among others. It also provides a basis for inferring from prices the earnings process and the expected future earnings as perceived by market participants. In doing so, it inverts the familiar price-earnings relationship and uses price as a predictor of earnings. The study differs from previous research which has examined the time series behavior of earnings based solely on previous earnings realizations. This approach can potentially lead to earnings forecasting models that are more accurate than the random walk with a drift that has been robust against challengers. In particular, the evidence indicates that security prices behave as if earnings are perceived to be dramatically different from a simple random walk process. Preliminary evidence also indicates that price-based forecasting models are more accurate than the random walk with a drift model.     

信息过载是否影响投资者对公开信息的使用——来自季度盈余的实证证据

首季季报之所以可能导致投资者的信息过载原因有二 :一是许多公司在同一天披露其季报 ;二是公司的年报和季报有可能同时披露。我们的结果说明了信息的集中披露本身并不妨碍投资者对信息的及时利用 ,这些发现对我国资本市场上信息披露监管机构有着直接的政策性含义。