Investment Decisions and Managerial Discipline: Evidence from the Takeover Market

This article focuses on the relative importance of boards of directors and the hostile takeover market in disciplining managers who make poor acquisition decisions. The evidence shows a weak inverse relationship between acquisition performance and the likelihood of becoming a takeover target, but only after it becomes clear that the internal control mechanism has failed. A forced turnover of a top executive was more likely in the 1990s, the more negative the abnormal return associated with an acquisition announcement. The relationship between forced turnover and negative acquisition returns is stronger when hostile takeover activity is less intense. Hence, it appears that being disciplined for making a poor acquisition is a function more of the internal control mechanism than of the workings of the takeover market.     

Market Timing and Managerial Portfolio Decisions

This paper provides evidence that top managers have contrarian views on firm value. Managers' perceptions of fundamental value diverge systematically from market valuations, and perceived mispricing seems an important determinant of managers' decision making. Insider trading patterns shows that low valuation firms are regarded as undervalued by their own managers relative to high valuation firms. This finding is robust to controlling for noninformation motivated trading. Further evidence links managers' private portfolio decisions to changes in corporate capital structures, suggesting that managers try to actively time the market both in their private trades and in firm‐level decisions.     

Managerial Entrenchment and Capital Structure Decisions

We study associations between managerial entrenchment and firms' capital structures, with results generally suggesting that entrenched CEOs seek to avoid debt. In a cross-sectional analysis, we find that leverage levels are lower when CEOs do not face pressure from either ownership and compensation incentives or active monitoring. In an analysis of leverage changes, we find that leverage increases in the aftermath of entrenchment-reducing shocks to managerial security, including unsuccessful tender offers, involuntary CEO replacements, and the addition to the board of major stockholders.     

The Effects of Guidance Frequency and Guidance Goal on Managerial Decisions

We conduct an experiment to examine the effects of guidance frequency (frequent vs. infrequent) and guidance goal (accuracy vs. meet/beat vs. truthful) on managers’ operating decisions. We find that frequent guiders sacrifice total earnings for quarterly earnings predictability irrespective of their guidance goals. Furthermore, when guidance is infrequent, guiders with accuracy goals opt for quarterly earnings predictability over total earnings more often than do guiders with either meet/beat goals or truthful goals. These findings have implications for regulators and investors in terms of the unintended consequences of requesting frequent earnings guidance. Further, while managers may perceive that accuracy goals can help their firms establish forecasting and reporting reputations, we show that accuracy goals may result in dysfunctional internal managerial decisions, particularly when guidance is issued infrequently.     

Investment Decisions Depend on Portfolio Disclosures

A weekly database of retail money fund portfolio statistics is uneconomical for retail investors to observe, so it allows direct comparison of disclosed and undisclosed portfolios. This makes possible a more direct and unambiguous test for "window dressing" than elsewhere in the literature. The analysis shows that funds allocating between government and private issues hold more in government issues around disclosures than at other times, consistent with the theory that intermediaries prefer to disclose safer portfolios. Cross-sectional comparisons locate the most intense rebalancing in the worst recent performers.     

Managerial Entrenchment and Corporate Social Performance

Abstract:  We examine empirically the relationships amongst managerial entrenchment practices, social performance, and financial performance. We hypothesize that entrenched managers may collude with non-shareholder stakeholders in order to reinforce their entrenchment strategy; this is particularly so in firms that have efficient internal control mechanisms. Moreover, we prove that the combination of entrenchment strategies and the implementation of socially responsible actions have particularly negative effects on financial performance. We test these contentions with a sample of 358 companies, from 22 different countries, for the period 2002–2005.     

Controlling Investment Decisions: Depreciation- and Capital Charges

This paper examines a multiperiod principal-agent model in which a divisional manager has superior information regarding the profitability of an investment project available to his division. The manager also contributes to the periodic operating cash flows of his division through personally costly effort. We demonstrate that it is optimal for the principal to delegate the investment decision and to base the manager's compensation on the residual income performance measure. Our analysis points to a class of depreciation rules and to a particular capital charge rate which together ensure that a profitable (unprofitable) project makes a positive (negative) contribution to residual income in every period. As a consequence, the compensation parameters for each period can be chosen freely so as to address the moral hazard problems without impacting the manager's investment incentives.     

管理者行为、企业生命周期与非效率投资

本文从企业生命周期视角研究管理者代理行为和管理者过度自信对企业非效率投资的动态影响。选取2012-2015年深沪主板上市公司数据进行实证检验,结果表明:随着企业生命周期的发展,管理者代理行为逐渐加强,管理者过度自信水平却逐渐减弱。管理者代理行为和过度自信共同导致企业非效率投资,成长期阶段的企业非效率投资主要受管理者过度自信的显著影响,管理者代理行为对企业非效率投资影响不显著;成熟期阶段的企业非效率投资既受管理者代理行为的显著影响,也受管理者过度自信的显著影响;衰退期阶段的企业非效率投资则主要受管理者代理行为的显著影响,管理者过度自信对企业非效率投资影响不显著。     

Investment and Abandonment Decisions with Uncertain Price and Cost

We analyze firms' investment and abandonment decisions when both output price and investment cost change stochastically. The model allows for and makes endogenous the abandonment decision, thereby incorporating irreversibility. We show that the investment trigger may be much higher than the standard net present value rule suggests even when a substantial portion of the investment cost may be recovered. Further, we argue that the correlation between output price and investment costs significantly affects the effect of irreversibility on investment behavior. Empirical implications are discussed with extensive numerical illustrations, along with an application to the banking industry.     

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.     

Managerial Skill and European PERE Fund Performance

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - Institutional investors often select private equity real estate (PERE) funds based on the belief that some of the managers possess skill. In this...     

净现值与内部收益率在投资决策中的选用

净现值和内部收益率是投资决策中最常用的两个主要指标,但是,通过深入分析我们发现,后者在满足净效益最大化决策目标、假设条件的经济合理性以及普遍适用性三个方面均存在严重缺陷,因而不是一个可靠的项目价值衡量指标,最多只能用作决策的参考,不能用作项目取舍的依据。     

Tax Rate Uncertainty, Investment Decisions, and Tax Neutrality

This article deals with the effects of tax rate uncertainty (TRU) on individual investment behavior. We show that under risk neutrality as well as under risk aversion, increased TRU has an ambiguous impact on investment, depending on the investment project's structure of cash flows and depreciation deductions. Although the investment effects are small the popular view that tax policy uncertainty depresses real investment is rejected. Further, tax neutrality in the light of tax policy uncertainty is defined more precisely. Neutrality results for the Johansson-Samuelson tax and the cash flow tax that are known from certainty are confirmed under TRU.     

Share Option Rewards and Managerial Performance: an Abnormal Performance Index Model

Managerial share option schemes are widely used as a means of motivating and rewarding corporate performance. Such schemes normally adopt a static exercise price; when additional exercise criteria are employed they are often based on earnings per share. A static exercise price does not adjust for economic changes outside the control of management, and earnings per share hurdles have similar limitations. This paper presents a ‘phantom’ managerial option based on relative performance, together with a pricing model for the valuation of the option. The option is developed and demonstrated using an abnormal performance index. It offers a structure which could be used for different forms of performance measurement, and resolves some important criticisms of the reward and incentive effects of traditional schemes.     

Performance of Neural Networks in Managerial Forecasting

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a multi-layered neural network as a tool for forecasting in a managerial time-series setting. To handle noisy data of limited length we adopted two different neural network approaches. First, the neural network is used as a pattern classifier to automate the ARMA model-identification process. We tested the performance of multi-layered neural networks with two statistical feature extractors: ACF/PACF and ESACF. We found that ESACF provides better performance, although the noise in ESACF patterns still caused the classification performance to deteriorate. Therefore we adopted the noise-filtering network as a preprocessor to the pattern-classification network, and were able to achieve an average of about 89% classification accuracy. Second, the neural network is used as a tool for function approximation and prediction. To alleviate the overfitting problem we adopted the structure of minimal networks and recurrent networks. The experiment with three real-world time series showed that the prediction by Elman's recurrent network outperformed those by the ARMA model and other structures of multi-layered neural networks, especially when the time series contained significant noise.     

Interactions of Corporate Financing and Investment Decisions: A Dynamic Framework

This article analyzes the interaction between a firm's dynamic investment, operating, and financing decisions in a model with operating adjustment and recapitalization costs. Using numerical analysis, we solve the model for cases that highlight interaction effects. We find that higher production flexibility (due to lower costs of shutting down and reopening a production facility) enhances the firm's debt capacity, thereby increasing the net tax shield value of debt financing. While higher financial flexibility (resulting from lower recapitalization costs) has a similar effect, production flexibility and financial flexibility are, to some extent, substitutes. We find that the impact of debt financing on the firm's investment and operating decisions is economically insignificant.     

Firm Performance and Managerial Succession in Family Managed Firms

Abstract:  This paper investigates whether the family status of a company's top officer affects managerial replacement decisions. We report evidence that family-managed companies are characterized by higher levels of board control and potentially weak internal governance systems. Family CEOs are less likely than non-family CEOs to depart their position following poor performance. Stock prices react favorably and operating performance improves when companies announce the departure of a family CEO. Overall, our evidence suggests that shareholders benefit when a powerful CEO leaves their position in the company.     

股票投资决策中的处置效应及其应对策略

采用行为经济学取向的情景实验方法,分别以253名成人、263名经济学专业的大学生和349名中国A股市场上的个体投资者为被试,对股票投资决策中的处置效应及其相关因素进行了系列实证研究.结果发现:总体上讲三种被试都存在明显的处置效应.相对于替他人做股票投资决策,成人被试在为自己做股票投资决策时表现出更强的处置效应.股票投资年限在3年及以上的个体投资者被试在其股票投资决策中所表现出的处置效应程度要弱于股票投资年限在3年以下的个体投资者.建议使用角色置换他人化和投资盈利目的化等策略减弱处置效应.