彝乡南涧

踏上滇西彝乡南涧的土地,我立即就被这儿火热的气候及更火热的民风俘虏了去. 因国家级小湾电站的开发,这片彝乡的县城正在建设中.新建的街道笔直宽敞,两旁及街中间都匠心独具地栽种着花草、绿化树,色彩浓烈的红、黄、紫色花配上浓绿的行道树,让旅途、工作、劳作辛劳的人们见了,目光为之一亮.     

真情真心真爱——太平人寿北京分公司客服活动侧记

中秋月圆夜,北京,国家图书馆嘉言堂。暮色下的剧场散发着浓浓的节日气氛,门口是喜气洋洋的红灯笼,迎面走来的是笑容可掬的职场丽人,随处听到的是热情的问候和开怀的笑声。剧场里,白发苍苍的老者慈祥微笑,顽皮可爱的幼童欢娱跳跃,情侣在低声细语,老朋友正愉快地交谈。     

多重因素考验我国经济

2008年,我国经济受到了多重因素的考验.如果处理不好,我国经济的持续发展就会受到较大影响. 首先是生产成本的上升和物价指数的持续走高.随着油价飙升至每桶110美元,这轮由食品主导的物价指数上涨有向生产资料扩散的趋势,石油作为企业生产资料的组成部分,它的最大问题就是不可控.     

金融海啸中的美国体验

编者按:这篇文章所展现的,是借助一个青年学生的双眼看到的当前的美国,这位二十岁的孩子不仅看到了美国的表像,还透视了该国的文化深处,更可贵的是他还议论我们民族的所长所短.这样的好文章,不应当从读者的眼皮子底下溜掉.     

“蜗居小子”的椰壳财富

在椰树林立的海南岛,人们喝完椰汁之后,通常会将一文不值的椰子壳扔掉。一位目光敏锐的打工仔,却从这些废弃物中发现了商机。"灰头土脸"的椰壳一经他的手,居然变成了一把把美观又环保的椰刷,以及绚丽多姿、维妙维肖的椰棕工艺品。他也从蜗居都市的失意青年,变成了拥有千万财富的传奇老板。     

留学一年有感

俄勒冈的夏天渐渐走来,距离回国,还有25天。我望着湛蓝的天空,回想着异乡留学生活的第一年。曾经的我,戴的还是圆圆的小眼镜,从不敢相信自己会离开父母,独自一个人在遥远的外地生活。别人家的孩子大都清早起床,自己骑车上学,我却要保姆背着我的书包,护送着穿过马路送到学校去。很多年过去了,我在大洋彼岸一个素不相识的饱受金融危机影响的美国人家里熬过了大半年,寄人篱下的生活让我尝到了委屈,尝到     

结构金融产品系列讲座(摘登)——整体业务证券化(一)

简而言之,整体业务证券化(WBS)即指将与运营公司的一级担保长期债券及其相关的信用风险重组成投资级和准投资级的债券等不同的部分.债券的偿付来源通常依赖于持续现金流,其中主要是运营公司的诸种业务所产生的未来现金流;如果债务人发生财务困境,则来源于包括房地产和存货等在内的公司资产的清算收益.     

新形势下我国银行业商业秘密的保护与管理

随着我国金融体制改革的不断深入,外资银行全面进入中国,银行之间的竞争将愈演愈烈.银行的商业秘密也将会在竞争中发挥着越来越重要的作用.而在这种新形势下如何保护与管理银行的商业秘密已经成为一个不容忽视的问题,因此本文从分析我国银行商业秘密的保护与管理的现状入手,找出存在的问题并提出建议与对策.     

财会战士

每天和同事一样进入办公楼,但是,你们的工作却是特殊的,你们是财经战线的一员。数字,大写的、小写的、无休无止的数字,就像密密麻麻的蚁群,布满了时间和空间。你们,仿佛懂得了昆虫语言的神灵,将铺天盖地的蚁群排列组合,     

矿物晶体收藏：尚待开发的“新大陆”

西方有这么一句话:石头是上帝随手捏的,矿物晶体是上帝用尺子丈量着精心设计出来的.在欧美,矿物晶体的鉴赏和收藏有着悠久的历史,拥有数以千万计的爱好者和收藏者,并有许多专门经销矿物晶体的公司和店铺.他们会定期举办矿物、宝石的博览会和交易会,以供世界矿物采集者、贸易商、爱好者和收藏家交流经验、互通有无.     

CFO重新定义

CFO简简单单的三个字母,在中国却有不同的演绎。最标准的说法是,CFO是Chief Financial Officer的缩写,即公司首席财政官或财务总监,是现代公司中最重要、最有价值的职位,是掌握着企业的神经系统(财务信息)和血液系统(现金资源)的灵魂人物。曾几何时,CFO也一度成为过街老鼠,甚     

Overconfidence and tax avoidance: The role of CEO and CFO interaction

We investigate how overconfident CEOs and CFOs may interact to influence firms’ tax avoidance. We adopt an equity measure to capture overconfident CEOs and CFOs and utilize multiple measures to identify companies’ tax-avoidance activities. We document that CFOs, as CEOs’ business partners, play an important role in facilitating and executing overconfident CEOs’ decisions in regard to tax avoidance. Specifically, we find that companies are more likely to engage in tax-avoidance activities when they have both overconfident CEOs and overconfident CFOs, compared with companies that have other combinations of CEO/CFO overconfidence (e.g., an overconfident CEO with a non-overconfident CFO), which is consistent with the False Consensus Effect Theory. Our study helps investors, regulators, and policymakers understand companies’ decision-making processes with regard to tax avoidance.     

A Corporate View of Research Needs in Corporate Finance

This paper reports the results of a survey of UK chief financial officers (CFOs) drawn from 72 large, 34 medium and 37 small companies on potentially important research topics in corporate finance. The paper suggests that there are gaps between extant academic research and the CFOs ‘needs for such research. The topics that the 143 CFOs would like to see on the research agenda include: the influence of tax laws on financial decision-making; investor reactions to companies concentrating on short-term gains to the almost total neglect of long-term benefits; effects of changes to the law on pension funds; cash flow planning and forecasting; regulators’ awareness of financial issues; and methods for determining the riskiness of a project. Of least importance to the CFOs are research on the significance of bankruptcy costs, influence of the City on corporate financial operations and impact of seasons on operational decisions. The degree of importance attributed to research topics seems to vary with firm size. In general, the findings of this study are similar to those from a survey of financial managers in the US.     

IPO“再”行动

在本刊所采访的四位CFO中,除了环球教育李巧恩之外,其余三位——博纳影业许亮、当当网杨嘉宏和斯凯网络杨家康均是在第一波海外上市浪潮当中兴起的。实际上,相比第一次IPO时的紧张和不知所措,在IPO"再"行动中,他们已经从容地掌控全局,更加注意节奏。对于已经经历过一次IPO的CFO们来说,除了过硬的专业能力之外,技巧和经验已经成为最重要的因素。     

产权性质、CFO背景特征与内部控制质量

基于高层梯队理论和社会网络理论,以2008-2015年我国A股上市公司为样本,实证考察CFO背景特征对公司内部控制质量的影响。研究发现：CFO的年龄越大、任期越长,内部控制质量越低;CFO的学历越高,内部控制质量越高;女性CFO较男性CFO在内部控制建设方面存在相对劣势;CFO外部兼职有助于提升内部控制质量。进一步研究发现：在国有企业和非国有企业中,CFO背景特征对内部控制质量的影响存在显著的差异。     

CAP Forum on Enron: Former Audit Firm Personnel as CFOs: Effect on Earnings Management*

Corporate hiring of former audit personnel to fill key financial positions is a practice that has attracted attention from the media, the accounting profession, and regulators. The concern is that the former external auditor who now holds a key position with the client may be able to circumvent the audit or exert pressure on the audit team and adversely influence audit quality. We compare a sample of 172 test companies that appointed to the position of chief financial officer (CFO) personnel who are former employees of the companies' auditors, with a control sample of companies that appointed new CFOs who were not affiliated with their auditors. We investigate whether the level of discretionary accruals is greater for the test sample compared with the control sample during the two years following appointment of the CFO. Both univariate and multivariate results for signed discretionary accruals suggest some support for the hypothesis that firms with affiliated CFOs are associated with greater earnings management than firms with unaffiliated CFOs. Furthermore, the results for signed discretionary accruals suggest that the association is stronger for nonpartners who moved from the audit firm to the client with little or no time gap. On average, the results for absolute discretionary accruals do not suggest differences in earnings management between affiliated and unaffiliated CFOs. However, they do indicate some earnings management relative to unaffiliated CFOs by CFOs who had little or no time gap between leaving the audit firm and joining the client firm, although at a weaker level of significance.     

发现财务价值之路

在全球经济真正复苏的前夜,企业需要彻底的"蜕变"。这种"蜕变"将以企业价值增长为核心,而如何权衡回报、增长、风险三者之间的关系,成为摆在所有CFO面前的考题。无论是中石油式"大司库",还是烟台万华式"财务云",答案不同,但目标唯一。中国企业的财务管理似乎正处在"最好的时代"和"最坏的时代":一方面,经济全球化的快速发展、高新技术的迅猛推进与CFO阶层的日渐崛起等因素,为企业财务管理水平的提升带来妙不可言的助益;另一方面,始于     

Evidence on What CFOs Think About the IPO Process: Practice,Theory, and Managerial Implications

Many privately held companies aspire to go public through an initial public offering. But the IPO process is time‐consuming, expensive, and fraught with uncertainty. With the aim of shedding light on the process and reducing at least some of the uncertainty, the authors asked several hundred CFOs to share their experiences and perceptions with regard to six specific aspects of the IPO process: (1) motives for going public; (2) the timing of IPOs; (3) criteria for choosing an underwriter; (4) cause of IPO underpricing; (5) IPO signaling; and (6) reasons to stay private. The main findings from the survey are summarized below:

• ? The primary motive for going public is to create a currency‐publicly traded shares‐that can be used to fund acquisitions.
• ? CFOs strongly base the timing of their IPOs on overall stock market conditions, while paying relatively little attention to IPO market conditions.
• ? CFOs choose underwriters based on their overall reputation and industry expertise. Somewhat surprisingly, issuers did not express much concern about the underwriter fee structure.
• ? CFOs view underpricing mainly as a means of compensating investors for taking on the risk of IPOs in the after‐market.
• ? The two strongest perceived positive signals for issuer quality are a history of strong earnings and the use of a reputable investment bank. The strongest negative signal is the sale of insider shares in the IPO.
• ? The primary reason for staying private cited by the CFOs of private companies is the desire to maintain decision‐making control.

     

Differences in the sophistication of Value-based Management – The role of top executives

This paper responds to recent calls for studying the diffusion of management practices beyond classifying companies as adopters and non-adopters (Ansari et al., 2010, Lounsbury, 2008). In particular, we examine how characteristics of CEOs and CFOs as well as perceived environmental uncertainty (PEU) of the top management team (TMT) affect the sophistication of Value-based Management (VBM) for which we develop a multi-dimensional construct.We base our analyses on a unique dataset that comprises archival data, interviews and survey data from top executives of German HDAX companies (58% response rate). The results of our Partial Least Squares (PLS) model (R² = 55%) support most of our hypotheses and provide interesting findings.We find that the CFOs in our sample have substantially more influence on VBM-sophistication than CEOs. In particular, we document that cognitive styles (educational background in business) of CFOs have a substantial impact on VBM-sophistication. Moreover, short-tenured CFOs are associated with high VBM-sophistication. As expected, the related negative effect of long tenure on VBM sophistication is practically offset if the CFO has an educational background in business.Another relevant finding is that high perceived environmental uncertainty of the top management team is significantly associated with lower VBM-sophistication. The results of our control variables moreover reveal that systematic risk (‘beta’) leads to higher VBM sophistication.     

HOW DO CFOs MAKE CAPITAL BUDGETING AND CAPITAL STRUCTURE DECISIONS?

This paper summarizes the findings of the authors' recent survey of 392 CFOs about the current practice of corporate finance, with main focus on the areas of capital budgeting and capital structure. The findings of the survey are predictable in some respects but surprising in others. For example, although the discounted cash flow method taught in our business schools is much more widely used as a project evaluation method than it was ten or 20 years ago, the popularity of the payback method continues despite shortcomings that have been pointed out for years. In setting capital structure policy, CFOs appear to place less emphasis on formal leverage targets that reflect the trade‐off between the costs and benefits of debt than on “informal” criteria such as credit ratings and financial flexibility. And despite the efforts of academics to demonstrate that EPS dilution per se should be irrelevant to stock valuation, avoiding dilution of EPS was the most cited reason for companies reluctance to issue equity. But despite such apparent contradictions between theory and practice, finance theory does seem to be gaining ground. For example, large companies were much more likely than their smaller counterparts to use DCF and NPV techniques, while small firms still tended to rely heavily on the payback criterion. And a majority of the CFOs of the large companies said they had “strict” or “somewhat strict” target debt ratios, whereas only a third of small firms claimed to have such targets. What does the future hold? On the one hand, the authors suggest that we are likely to see greater corporate acceptance of certain aspects of financial theory, including the use of real options techniques for evaluating corporate investments. But we are also likely to see further modifications and refinements of the theory, particularly with respect to smaller companies that have limited access to capital markets.