Eco-efficiency and firm value

Eco-efficiency refers to a process that seeks to maximize the effectiveness of business processes while minimizing their impacts on the environment. Fundamental to eco-efficiency is adoption of a management philosophy that stimulates the search for environmental improvements that yield parallel economic benefits [President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 1996a. Sustainable America: A New Consensus for Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment. Government Printing Office, Washington DC; President’s Council on Sustainable Development, 1996b. Eco-efficiency: Task Force Report. Government Printing Office, Washington DC; World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), 2000. Eco-efficiency: Creating More Value with Less Input. Geneva]. Eco-efficiency is increased by activities that create economic value while continuously reducing ecological impacts and the use of natural resources [DeSimone, L., Popoff, F., 1997. Eco-efficiency: The Business Link To Sustainable Development. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA]. This study empirically examines the proposition that implementation of eco-efficient business strategies is associated with higher firm value. We posit that, firms which adopt eco-efficient business strategies and, as a consequence, achieve reduced costs and increased profits should be more highly valued by the market than similar firms that do not adopt eco-efficient business strategies. Our empirical testing supports this proposition.     

Blockholder dispersion and firm value

Multiple blockholder structures are a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. The theoretical literature, however, provides conflicting predictions on whether a single large blockholder or a set of dispersed smaller blockholders is better for firm value. Using U.S. data, we find a negative correlation between Tobin's Q and blockholder dispersion. The findings are robust to a wide variety of model specifications and controls and differ from results for other geographic regions such as Europe and Asia.     

Director attention and firm value

In this article, we show that exogenous director distraction affects board monitoring intensity and leads to a higher level of inactivity by management. We construct a firm-level director “distraction” measure by exploiting shocks to unrelated industries in which directors have additional directorships. Directors attend significantly fewer board meetings when they are distracted. Firms with distracted board members tend to be inactive and experience a significant decline in firm value. Overall, this article highlights the impact of limited director attention on the effectiveness of corporate governance and the importance of directors in keeping management active.     

Multiple founders and firm value

In this paper, we highlight the existence of multi-founder firms, which were founded by multiple individuals (with no family connections) who are still actively involved in the firm as directors and/or managers. These firms provide a unique setting to shed further light on the net valuation effects of founder involvement. In particular, multi-founder firms provide us with the opportunity to examine the benefits and costs to shareholders of multiple founders involved as directors, CEOs and managers in the same firm. Our analysis indicates that multi-founder firms are more valuable than all other types of firms, including single-founder firms and family firms, with the valuation premium positively related to the number of founders involved in the firm. Further analysis confirms that this valuation premium is linked to the direct involvement of the multiple founders as directors and CEOs. However, further founder involvement in vice president positions has a negative relationship with firm value.     

Stakeholder welfare and firm value

Using data from the independent social choice investment advisory firm Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini (KLD), we construct a stakeholder welfare score measuring the extent to which firms meet the expectation of their non-shareholder stakeholders (such as employees, customers, communities, and environment), and find it to be associated with positive valuation effects: an increase of 1 in the stakeholder welfare score leads to an increase of 0.587 in Tobin’s Q. Furthermore, the valuation effects vary across stakeholders and the aforementioned positive effects are driven by firms’ performance on employee relations and environmental issues. These results suggest that stakeholder welfare (in particular, employee welfare and environmental performance) represents intangibles (such as reputation or human capital) crucial for shareholder value creation rather than private benefits managers pursue for their own social or economic needs.     

Financial development,government ownership of banks and firm innovation

Using a newly-available World Bank survey of over 28,000 firms from 46 countries, we examine how financial development affects firm innovation around the world. We find that while stock market development significantly enhances firm innovation, banking sector development has mixed effects. We show that the latter result can be explained by different levels of government ownership of banks. Specifically, in countries with lower government ownership of banks, banking sector development significantly enhances firm innovation; while in countries with higher government ownership of banks, banking sector development has no significant or sometimes even significantly negative effects on firm innovation. Such negative effects are significantly stronger for smaller firms. The results are robust to various controls such as firms’ human capital and ownership structure, to estimations using instrumental variable techniques and alternative measures of firm innovation.     

On-balance-sheet duration hedging and firm value

In this study we consider the determinants and effects of on-balance-sheet duration hedging for non-financial US firms. The difference between the duration of assets and liabilities, or duration gap, is negatively related to growth opportunities, and positively related to profitability, corporate cash holdings, and managerial ownership. We find that both a lower duration gap and a lower absolute value of duration gap are associated with higher firm values. Moreover, we find some evidence that firms with larger duration gaps performed worse during the market-wide liquidity shock accompanying the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.     

Dominant institutional owners and firm value

This research analyzes the impact of control by dominant institutional owners (banking institutions and investment funds) on firm value. The analysis considers the level of voting rights in the hands of the dominant institutional owner and other large shareholders. The results reveal a different effect on value depending on whether the dominant institutional investor is a banking institution or an investment fund. Moreover, the results show that the presence of other large shareholders affects firm value when a dominant institutional owner controls the firm.     

Multiple large shareholders and firm value

This paper investigates the effects of having multiple large shareholders on the valuation of firms. Using data on Finnish listed firms, we show, consistent with our model, that a more equal distribution of votes among large blockholders has a positive effect on firm value. This result is particularly strong in family-controlled firms suggesting that families (which typically have managerial or board representation) are more prone to private benefit extraction if they are not monitored by another strong blockholder. We also show that the relation between multiple blockholders and firm value is significantly affected by the identity of these blockholders.     

Stock market liquidity and firm value

This paper investigates the relation between stock liquidity and firm performance. The study shows that firms with liquid stocks have better performance as measured by the firm market-to-book ratio. This result is robust to the inclusion of industry or firm fixed effects, a control for idiosyncratic risk, a control for endogenous liquidity using two-stage least squares, and the use of alternative measures of liquidity. To identify the causal effect of liquidity on firm performance, we study an exogenous shock to liquidity—the decimalization of stock trading—and show that the increase in liquidity around decimalization improves firm performance. The causes of liquidity's beneficial effect are investigated: Liquidity increases the information content of market prices and of performance-sensitive managerial compensation. Finally, momentum trading, analyst coverage, investor overreaction, and the effect of liquidity on discount rates or expected returns do not appear to drive the results.     

Managerial ownership dynamics and firm value

From 1988 to 2003, the average change in managerial ownership is significantly negative every year for American firms. We find that managers are more likely to significantly decrease their ownership when their firms are performing well and more likely to increase their ownership when their firms become financially constrained. When controlling for past stock returns, we find that large increases in managerial ownership increase Tobin's q. This result is driven by increases in shares held by officers, while increases in shares held by directors appear unrelated to changes in firm value. There is no evidence that large decreases in ownership have an adverse impact on firm value. We rely on the dynamics of the managerial ownership/firm value relation to mitigate concerns in the literature about the endogeneity of managerial ownership.     

Investability, corporate governance and firm value

In this paper, I show that “investable premia” are greatest for transparent, well-governed firms. I find that single-class share investable firms and better-governed firms reap the largest valuation gains from becoming investable. Dual-class share firms do gain from becoming investable, but their gains are much lower than that of single-class share firms. These findings suggest that the failure on the part of firms to remedy agency conflicts prior to becoming investable only serves to greatly reduce, or even nullify their “investable premia”.     

Unanticipated inflation and the value of the firm

Evidence presented here indicates that the relationship between stock returns and unexpected inflation differs systematically across firms. The differences are shown to be consistent with cross-sectional variation in firms' nominal contracts (monetary claims and depreciation tax shields). The differences are also partially explained by proxies for underlying firm characteristics that could create interaction between unexpected inflation and operating profitability. Finally, much if not most of the differences appear to arise because unexpected inflation is correlated with changes in expected aggregate real activity, the effects of which tend to vary across firms according to their systematic risk.     

Do foreign investments increase firm value and firm performance? Evidence from Japan

As empirical evidence on the impact of internationalization on firm performance remains unclear, we revisit the question of whether foreign investments enhance firm value and firm performance. Using a panel sample of publicly listed firms in Japan during the 1990–2016 period, we find that foreign investments are negatively associated with firm value. In addition, foreign investments are negatively related to firm performance at short- and long-horizons. Furthermore, foreign investments appear to reduce revenue growth but have no effect on firm efficiency, suggesting that simply increasing foreign investments does not necessarily enhance revenue growth or firm efficiency.     

Signaling firm value to active investors

Active investors provide risk-sharing and value-adding effort in form of advising, networking, monitoring, etc. This paper demonstrates a conflict between two key objectives for high-quality entrepreneurs: to elicit such investor effort and to signal the firm’s type by retaining shares. This conflict may give rise to stable (and economically meaningful) pooling equilibria for startup firms. More established firms, with access to multiple signals, can always realize both of these objectives but may still decide to forego investor effort if eliciting it would require them to deviate substantially from the cost-minimizing signal mix. In comparison with otherwise identical pure-exchange settings (with passive investors), we find that the potential for investors to be active always increases the signaling cost in case of noncontractible investor effort, whereas the effect is ambiguous if investor effort is contractible. At the same time, we identify conditions under which signaling is welfare-enhancing as it helps guide investors’ effort towards more promising ventures.     

Multiple blockholders,power, and firm value

Using a comprehensive sample of US firms we show that most of them have multiple blockholders whose presence and ownership stakes lead to a significant difference between ownership and power. This difference matters. First, we find that insider power (ownership) is negatively (positively) related to firm value. Second, we show that outsider power is positively related to firm value. Our direct blockholder-level measure of power explains firm value over and above the explanatory power of firm-level measures used in the literature (such as the number of blockholders and the dispersion of their ownership stakes).     

Staggered boards,corporate opacity and firm value

We explore the effect of corporate opacity on the relation between staggered boards and firm value. We find that through mitigating takeover pressure, staggered boards become increasingly beneficial to firm value as opacity increases. In addition, we document that staggered boards reduce value only in transparent firms. Additional tests indicate that, as opacity increases, staggered boards bear an increasingly positive relation to research and development and CEO pay-performance sensitivity. Taken together, these results suggest that corporate opacity affects the value impact of takeover protection.     

Corporate governance and firm value: International evidence

In this paper, we investigate the relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm value based on a large and previously unused dataset from Governance Metrics International (GMI) comprising 6663 firm-year observations from 22 developed countries over the period from 2003 to 2007. Based on a set of 64 individual governance attributes we construct two alternative additive corporate governance indices with equal weights attributed to the governance attributes and one index derived from a principal component analysis. For all three indices we find a strong and positive relation between firm-level corporate governance and firm valuation. In addition, we investigate the value relevance of governance attributes that document the companies' social behavior. Regardless of whether these attributes are considered individually or aggregated into indices, and even when “standard” corporate governance attributes are controlled for, they exhibit a positive and significant effect on firm value. Our findings are robust to alternative calculation procedures for the corporate governance indices and to alternative estimation techniques.