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。     

Do Asset Fire Sales Exist? An Empirical Investigation of Commercial Aircraft Transactions

This paper uses commercial aircraft transactions to determine whether capital constraints cause firms to liquidate assets at discounts to fundamental values. Results indicate that financially constrained airlines receive lower prices than their unconstrained rivals when selling used narrow-body aircraft. Capital constrained airlines are also more likely to sell used aircraft to industry outsiders, especially during market downturns. Further evidence that capital constraints affect liquidation prices is provided by airlines' asset acquisition activity. Unconstrained airlines significantly increase buying activity when aircraft prices are depressed; this pattern is not observed for financially constrained airlines.     

Capital Gains Taxation and Stock Market Activity: Evidence from IPOs

Prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA '86), long-term capital gains were taxed at a lower rate than short-term gains, presenting investors with an opportunity to increase their after-tax return by delaying the sale of appreciated assets until after they qualified for long-term status and selling depreciated assets prior to long-term qualification. Using a sample of Initial Public Offerings, I find that stocks that appreciated prior to long-term qualification exhibit increased volume and decreased returns just after their qualification date, while stocks that depreciated prior to long-term qualification exhibit these effects just prior to their qualification date.     

The Reliability of Reported Profits and Asset Values, 1890–1914: Case Studies from the British Coal Industry

Considering the vital importance of coal to the British economy before 1914, it is clear that accounting practices in the coal industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have received too little attention. There is a particular need for studies comparable to the work on railways and iron and steel which has examined conventions for accounting for capital expenditure. Such conventions create serious difficulties in the interpretation of reported profits and asset values for historians of any industry and may also have misled contemporaries. Evidence for the coal industry which has been examined up till now has indicated that standard practice comprised a modified form of the replacement accounting used by railway companies. This paper examines the extent to which this supposition is justified. It concentrates on the accounting policies of five important colliery companies and on the effects of these policies on profits and the book values of fixed assets. Two principal conclusions have emerged. The first is that, although replacement accounting was certainly widespread, accounting policies were more complex and more diverse than has hitherto been suggested. The second is that it is frequently impossible for the historian to determine whether balance sheet values are indicative of capital employed. Both profits and asset values were in most cases highly unreliable.     

Efficiently Inefficient Markets for Assets and Asset Management

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more easily, more money is allocated to active management, fees are lower, and asset prices are more efficient. Informed managers outperform after fees, uninformed managers underperform, while the average manager's performance depends on the number of “noise allocators.” Small investors should remain uninformed, but large and sophisticated investors benefit from searching for informed active managers since their search cost is low relative to capital. Hence, managers with larger and more sophisticated investors are expected to outperform.     

Capital Structure and Assets: Effects of an Implicit Collateral

This paper analyses a firm's capital structure choice when assets have outside value. Valuable assets implicitly provide a collateral and increase tax shield exploitation. The key feature in this paper is asset value uncertainty, implying that it is unknown ex ante whether the equity holders ex post optimally sell the assets or re‐optimise the capital structure. Ex ante, more uncertain asset value decreases leverage, but not firm value, and selling the assets becomes less likely. Firms should tend to invest in assets whose value is less correlated to changes in earnings and, in addition, asset sales are less likely when this correlation is low.     

HOW TO FIX ACCOUNTING—MEASURE AND REPORT ECONOMIC PROFIT

Bending accounting rules has become so ingrained in our corporate culture that even ethical business leaders succumb to the temptation to “manage” their earnings in order to meet analysts' demands for smoothly rising results. The author of this article argues that such behavior reflects not a general decline in ethical standards so much as executives' growing sense that accounting itself has become “unhinged from value.” For example, clearly valuable expenditures on R&D, customer acquisition, and employee training are generally expensed immediately against earnings. And reported corporate income is often further reduced by provisions for losses that most companies never expect to incur, by “book” taxes they never expect to pay, and by depreciation charges on assets that are actually increasing in value. At the same time, the opportunity costs associated with employee stock options and the corporate use of equity capital are not reflected in the accountant's measure of profit. To improve the quality of corporate governance and revitalize the public's faith in reported earnings, the author proposes a complete overhaul of GAAP accounting to measure and report economic profit, or EVA. Stated in brief, the author's concept of economic profit begins with an older, but now seldom used, definition of accounting income known as “residual income,” and then proposes a series of additional adjustments to GAAP accounting that are designed to produce a reliable measure of a company's annual, sustainable cash‐generating capacity. Besides expensing the cost of equity capital as well as stock options, the author recommends bringing off‐balance‐sheet items such as pension assets and liabilities back onto the balance sheet, eliminating reserve accounting, capitalizing R&D and other expenditures on intangible assets, and recording economic rather than accounting depreciation. Such changes, by replacing the accountants' current flawed definition of earnings with a comprehensive new statement of value added, could restore investor confidence in financial statements. Even more important, managers would be less likely to pursue their now common practice of boosting earnings by making value‐reducing operating and investment decisions and more likely to use financial reporting not to mislead the market but as an opportunity to communicate relevant, forward‐looking information.     

The Earnings Smoothing Potential of Systematic Depreciation

Ample evidence exists that managers attempt to use 'artificial' choices concerning alternative accounting procedures for classification, valuation and allocation of transactions to smooth reported periodic income or earnings series. However, the actual smoothing effect of such choices and their influence on the properties of earnings numbers is unknown. This study analyses the smoothing potential of depreciation when systematically applied. It exploits an idea regarding the effects of inclusion of expectations information in earnings calculations due to Willett (1988, 1991b), theoretically elaborated by Gibbins and Willett (1997) and applied analytically by Lane and Willett (1997). Using a statistical activity cost theory (SACT) framework, we quantify the smoothing (variance reduction) potential of straight-line and reducing-balance depreciation methods and compare the potential with an analytically derived depreciation method which optimizes variance reduction. We also evaluate the effects of conditioning factors such as accuracy of managers' expectations and relative asset acquisition and disposal values upon smoothing potential. We find that systematically depreciating assets can smooth undepreciated earnings numbers. Straight-line depreciation can exploit virtually all of this potential and reducing-balance depreciation a substantial proportion. However, realising this potential varies greatly depending on conditioning factors. The investigation is practical and policy oriented but complementary to theoretical extensions of the sort suggested by Butler et al. (1994). While the article focuses on depreciation, the SACT framework is completely general and may be extended to any choice of method for smoothing earnings series.     

Investments in Human Capital in Different Institutional Environments

This chapter investigates the proportion of labor costs that represents investments in human capital, and the rate of amortization of this asset in all six countries for which the required data are available in the Compustat Global Vantage database. The sample includes countries with different financial and legal systems, which enables us to investigate how the growth and depreciation rates of human capital and the resulting human capital asset ratio differ in different institutional environments. The results indicate that the estimated proportion of labor expenses that represents investments in human capital is large in the so-called common-law countries with a market-based financial system. On the other hand, the depreciation rate of the estimated human capital assets is lower in these countries. The results, therefore, indicate that the human capital assets are high in equity-oriented financial reporting environments. The results also indicate that the estimated ratios of the human capital asset to market value of equity are reasonably related to firm characteristics that are hypothesized to be determinants of the human capital asset ratios. Finally, these results remain the same in different industries.     

Replacement Cost Asset Valuation and Regulation of Energy Infrastructure Tariffs

In Australia, access tariffs (rental charges) paid by third party users to the owners of energy transmission assets (e.g., gas pipelines) are determined by regulators on the basis of their depreciated optimized replacement cost (known as DORC). Reliance on the replacement cost, rather than actual cost, of existing assets inflates tariffs and incites the criticism that asset owners earn a return on investments of a scale never made. The economic rationale of the regulators' model is that it emulates the workings of a contestable market, by setting tariffs at a level just short of that required to motivate a new entrant (system duplication). Properly reconstructed, this model constitutes a dynamic and internally consistent theory of replacement cost valuation and depreciation. Its mathematical consequences, however, especially with regard to the valuation of sunk assets with long times to expiry, are shown to be practically and politically unpalatable. In particular, the implied tariff levels for such assets are very close to those that would apply to new infrastructure assets built today at today's prices. Regulators unwilling to accept this implication of a new-entrant-exclusion pricing logic are left with no alternative framework for DORC.     

Asset mispricing in peer-to-peer loan secondary markets

This study examines the presence of mispricing on Bondora, a leading European peer-to-peer lending platform, over the 2016–2019 period. By implementing machine learning methods, we measure the likelihood of success for loan resale on Bondora's secondary market and compare our predictions with the ex-post market outcomes. The differences observed uncover two phenomena which are related to the diverging perceptions of market participants on asset prices and associated fundamentals: some non-saleable assets are sold, while the resale of highly saleable assets is not successful. Sellers' pricing behaviour changes once they observe buyers' actions revealing the buyers' beliefs about the value of the asset. Our results are robust to various statistical and machine learning methods.     

Mark-to-market accounting and liquidity pricing

When liquidity plays an important role as in financial crises, asset prices may reflect the amount of liquidity available rather than the asset's future earning power. Using market prices to assess financial institutions’ solvency in such circumstances is not desirable. We show that a shock in the insurance sector can cause the current market value of banks’ assets to fall below their liabilities so they are insolvent. In contrast, if values based on historic cost are used, banks can continue and meet all their future liabilities. We discuss the implications for the debate on mark-to-market versus historic cost accounting.     

LESSORS' DEPRECIATION AND PROFIT-AN APPROACH VIA DEPRIVAL VALUE

Lessor accounting raises intriguing problems. Its accepted methods spread depreciation, and thus profit, in yearly doses whose size jumps capriciously and with scant regard to any principle. Yet the economic qualities of an (asset do not change just because it is leased; the only new factor is the odd way in which tax and interest re-shape its cash flows. If the rules of deprival value are sound for familiar assets, they should be sound too for leased assets. But its arithmetic must expand to cover flows (tax and interest) that are not usually coupled with depreciation. Two results then follow: after-tax profit tends to be constant throughout the lease, and the full size of tax bounty becomes clear.     

Accrual Accounting,Informational Sufficiency,and Equity Valuation

This paper studies accrual accounting and equity valuation in the context of a firm that makes repeated and overlapping investments in productive capacity. The analysis identifies a particular accrual accounting (depreciation) rule that is termed replacement cost accounting because the book value of existing capacity assets is set equal to the value that such assets would have if a competitive market were to exist for used assets. It is shown that replacement cost accounting aggregates past investment decisions of the firm without a loss of value‐relevant information. The intrinsic value of the firm can then be expressed as a function of current accounting data and certain parameters of the firm’s operating environment. Further, it is shown that replacement cost accounting is essentially the only accounting rule with this informational sufficiency property.     

The Role of Resource Accounting in the UK Government's Quest for ‘Better Accounting’

The UK government intends to introduce resource accounting to central government departments under the banner of ‘Better Accounting for the Taxpayer's Money’. Under the proposed system of resource accounting, as outlined in a White Paper, an annual depreciation charge is to be incorporated in the cost statement and fixed assets included in a balance sheet at their depreciated replacement cost. This paper locates the proposed changes in accounting method for government departments in the general spread of accruals accounting through the public sector, and explores the relevance of accruals as a basis for measuring the results of activity undertaken by government departments. It goes on to examine the impact of the specific accounting change envisaged in the White Paper from both theoretical and practical aspects. The benefits envisaged in the White Paper are considered along with the extent to which they are likely to be realised, together with any consequences not explicitly foreseen. The conclusion is that, while the revised accounting techniques may be different, the proposition implicit in the White Paper's title that they re better is not proven by the evidence presented.     

Economic vs. accounting depreciation

In this paper we present and estimate a model of economic depreciation consistent with producer's optimization. The estimated economic depreciation, which is a function of the rate of utilization and level of maintenance, is about half of that used according to tax (accounting) depreciation. The difference between the economic and tax rates of depreciation results in a subsidy and earlier capital replacement. The implicit maximum net tax subsidy expressed as a proportion of the acquisition price of the asset is 13.3% for a sample of Canadian trucking firms.     

Economic consequences of firms’ depreciation method choice: Evidence from capital investments

This study identifies several interrelated reasons why firms’ depreciation method choice is likely to influence managers’ capital investment decisions. We find that firms that use accelerated depreciation make significantly larger capital investments than firms that use straight-line depreciation. Further, we find that there has been a migration away from accelerated depreciation to straight-line depreciation over the past two decades. Firms that make such accounting changes make smaller capital investments in the post-change periods than in the pre-change periods. These results suggest that a choice made for external financial reporting purposes influences managers’ capital investment decisions.     

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.     

利率扭曲与资产泡沫

本文在一般均衡的框架下,分析实际利率被扭曲时资产价格的表现。主要贡献是,为中央银行刻意压低实际利率的政策建模,并分析它对资产价格的含义。我们发现,当中央银行调整货币政策目标、压低实际利率的时候,具有抵押价值的资产,其价格会上升,从而产生资产价格泡沫。利率被扭曲的后果可以表述为,金融体系不可能同时达到以下三个政策目标:持续压低的实际利率、自由的按揭贷款,以及合理的资产价格。