R&D expenditures and implied equity risk premiums

This study investigates the relationship between research and development (R&D) expenditures and risk premiums implied in the costs of equity capital. We posit that R&D expenditures represent an information risk factor resulting from both information asymmetry about R&D between investors and managers and low-quality R&D reporting that impairs the coordination between investors and managers with respect to managers’ investment decisions. Our results support our position by showing a positive association between R&D expenditures and implied equity risk premiums. From this research along with prior studies, investors can have better knowledge about the risky nature of R&D expenditures that drive up implied risk premiums and at the same time provide opportunities to earn excess returns in a short to long horizon. Accounting standard setters can benefit from this study’s findings that R&D expenditures represent an off-balance-sheet risk factor and thus warrant reconsidering SFAS No. 2 for potential capitalization of R&D expenditures.     

深圳保险公估业发展研究报告

保险公估是国际上三大保险中介之一,其在保险理赔、风险评估领域发挥着重要的中介作用。深圳保险公估业在全国公估市场中占据重要地位,是中国保险公估发展的一个缩影。本文对深圳保险公估业的发展历程进行了梳理,运用数据分析的方法对深圳保险公估业发展现状进行了分析,提出了发展中遇到的主要问题,并对深圳保险公估业未来的发展提出了相关政策建议。     

Growing Pains: International Instability and Equity Market Returns

We use the ratio of growth in global military expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP) to capture ex ante expectations of political instability and explore the relation between this measure and returns. In a standard global asset pricing framework with 44 countries, this measure helps to explain cross‐country return differences. Furthermore, emerging countries have greater exposure to international political instability risk than developed countries. This partially explains the higher returns observed in emerging countries.     

IT use,productivity, and market power in banking

Information management is a core process in banking that can resolve information asymmetries and thereby help to mitigate competitive pressure. We test if the use of information technology (IT) contributes to bank output, and how IT-augmented bank productivity relates to differences in market power. Detailed bank-level information on the use of IT reveals a substantial upward bias in bank productivity estimates when ignoring banks’ IT expenditures. IT-augmented bank productivity correlates positively with Lerner markups. A mere increase in IT expenditures, however, reduces markups. Results hold across a range of bank output definitions and productivity estimation methods.     

Benefit-cost analysis and resource allocation decisions

Concern over the U.S. federal government's deteriorating infrastracture and large budget deficits has recently resulted in much attention being focused on the subject of federal capital expenditures (investments). At the same time, the Office of Management and Budget has recently taken steps to aggressively pursue a policy of requiring federal government managers to use benefit-cost (B-C) analysis techniques in preparing requests for certain types of capital expenditures. More specifically, OBM now requires the use of benefit-cost analysis techniques for major initiatives concerning the acquisition of information technology systems. In this paper it is argued, and empirically verified, that the federal government's use of B-C analysis technique affects the resource allocation process differently at different organizational levels (i.e. different decision strategies are appropriate at different organizational levels).     

The IPO corporate social responsibility information disclosure: Does the stock market care?

We create textual information indices using corporate social responsibility (CSR) information extracted from IPO prospectuses in China. We use the indices to measure the issuers’ corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate environmental performance (CEP) and assess how the stock market reacts. We find that CSP disclosure is significantly related to the post‐market performance of the firm. Specifically, better CSP disclosure is correlated with higher post‐IPO listing holding period returns among firms that do not disclose donations or environmental expenditures, although the association does not hold for firms that make donations and environmental expenditures. In addition, institutional investors seem to care more about the CEP information for a firm than the CSP information.     

Information asymmetry and investment–cash flow sensitivity

Models of capital market imperfections predict that information asymmetry decreases firm investment and increases the sensitivity of investment expenditures to fluctuations in internal funds. Previous empirical tests of the link between investment and financing decisions have relied on indirect measures of financial constraint due to market frictions. In contrast, we use more direct measures derived from the market microstructure literature. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, our analysis shows that scaled investment expenditures are on average lower and the investment–cash flow sensitivity is greater when the probability of informed trading is high. Our results are robust to alternative measures of informed trading and liquidity, but they are not pervasive in our sample.     

Household portfolio choices,health status and health care systems: A cross-country analysis based on SHARE

Health risk is increasingly viewed as an important form of background risk that affects household portfolio decisions. However, its role might be mediated by the presence of a protective full-coverage national health service that could reduce households’ probability of incurring current and future out-of-pocket medical expenditures. We use SHARE data to study the influence of current health status and future health risk on the decision to hold risky assets, across ten European countries with different health systems, each offering a different degree of protection against out-of-pocket medical expenditures. We find robust empirical evidence that perceived health status matters more than objective health status and, consistent with the theory of background risk, health risk affects portfolio choices only in countries with less protective health care systems. Furthermore, portfolio decisions consistent with background risk models are observed only with respect to middle-aged and highly-educated investors.     

Voluntary disclosure of corporate venture capital investments

In this paper, we investigate drivers of corporate venture capital investment announcements. Consistent with voluntary information disclosure theories, we find that a public announcement is less likely to be made when the start-up firm is in the seed stage but more likely when the parent company is large, active in concentrated markets and in non-high-tech industries; spends heavily on internal R&D and capital expenditures; has low leverage ratio; and faces more information asymmetry problems. In addition, corporate venture capital programs managed externally disclose more often than internal programs. We find that parent companies facing more severe asymmetric information problems enjoy the highest abnormal returns in response to announcements. This study contributes to the literature on voluntary information disclosure in that it evidences that larger corporations use disclosure of some of their investments in innovative startups strategically as a way to convey valuable information to the market.     

Equity compensation and the sensitivity of research and development to financial market frictions

When financial market frictions exist, executives may have to decide which investment activities to reduce when internal funds decrease. Expenditures on research and development (R&D) may be particularly vulnerable because of the long-term nature of innovative activity. We find that equity compensation is associated with lower levels of firm R&D expenditures. Rewarding executives to incur more risk has little effect on R&D expenditures, but rewarding executives for higher returns reduces R&D expenditures and makes R&D expenditures more sensitive to financial market frictions. In contrast, cash compensation reduces the sensitivity of R&D expenditures to financial market frictions.     

Futures dossier: Electronic information—impact of the database

Even in the high growth world of information technology, the growth in the use of electronic information services is startling. In 1978 there were 300 data-bases available in public services; by 1983 there were 2 000. The LINK report on database services in 1984¹ forecasts growth in US user expenditures for online database services from $1224 million in 1983 to $3 462 million in 1988. While this is small compared with the total revenues of the publishing industry, nevertheless it represents a significant trend in what people are willing to pay for information.     

CEO Risk Preference and Investing in R&D

This study aims at: (1) developing an index to measure CEO risk tolerance using publicly available data, and (2) examining the association between this index and investment in risky projects. Using relative pay‐at‐risk as a proxy for risk preference (tolerance) is a new proposition and is supported by having significant association with CEOs' socio‐demographic variables—the variables often studied in connection with risk aversion. Furthermore, this risk preference indicator has a positive association with risk‐taking behaviour as proxied by R&D expenditures. The in‐sample estimation and out‐of‐sample predictions support (a) using relative pay‐at‐risk as a valid proxy for risk tolerance, and (b) finding statistically significant positive association between this measure and R&D expenditures. The association has different degrees of strength for nine out of 11 industries.     

An Investor Perspective on the Black Box of Corporate Social Responsibility

In summarizing the findings of their recent study, the authors report findings that suggest that not all socially responsible corporate policies are likely to have the same effect on a company's ownership and value. Using environmental policy as their proxy for CSR activities, the authors classify corporate environmental practices into two categories: (1) actions that reduce the likelihood of harmful outcomes by reducing the corporate exposure to environmental risk; and (2) actions that enhance companies' perceived ‘greenness’ through investments that go beyond both legal requirements and any conceivable risk management rationale. Although both groups of environmental practices are likely to be viewed as socially beneficial, corporate expenditures that reduce a firm's environmental risk exposure are more likely to benefit shareholders by limiting the risk of losses arising from environmental accidents, lawsuits, and fines—and possibly thereby reducing the firm's cost of capital. By contrast, corporate expenditures that enhance the firm's perceived greenness by going beyond legal requirements and risk management rationales could actually reduce shareholder value. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors find that institutional investors tend to own smaller than average percentages of both companies the authors identify as ‘toxic’ and make limited efforts to manage their environmental risk, and companies they label ‘green’ with low environmental risk exposure but relatively high CSR spending on the environment. At the same time, such investors hold larger‐than‐average positions in ‘neutral’ companies with relatively low, or effectively managed, environmental risk exposures and limited investment in ‘greenness’ programs. The authors also find that both toxic and green companies have lower (Tobin's Q) valuations than neutral companies, and that otherwise toxic companies that effectively manage their environmental risk exposures have higher valuations.     

Voters prefer more qualified mayors,but does it matter for public finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close elections to estimate causal effects. We find that mayors with prior experience in office have a tendency to reduce the level of local public debt, lower total municipal expenditures and decrease the local taxes, even though these results are only significant in some specifications. In contrast, the education level of the mayor exerts no significant effects on the overall fiscal performance of the municipality. The results are partly surprising as both education and experience are shown to matter greatly in the electoral success of mayoral candidates.     

Accounting for Intangible Investments

The traditional categorisation of expenditures evident in many firms' charts of accounts and financial statements does not identify and measure expenditures on intangible investment separately from tangible investment and operating expenditures. This contrasts with the accounting for tangible investment, which separately accounts for all expenditures as assets unless the future benefits are consumed in a single accounting period. Further, in searching for better ways to account for intangibles, regulators and researchers have focused on the accounting choice problem relating to the existence and recognisability of intangible assets. In this paper, we argue that identifying and separately reporting the expenditures on intangible investment is the logical first step in accounting for intangible investments. Learning about the firm's categories of value driving (and sometimes potentially value destroying) expenditures has important implications for understanding aspects of the value chain, performance measurement, valuation, corporate governance and the external audit.     

Characteristics Associated with the Corporate Decision to Adopt Long‐term Performance Plans

This study investigates why firms adopt long‐term performance plans. The results provide evidence that firms that adopt long‐term performance plans have higher risk as measured by Beta, have lower percentages of managerial stockholdings, have higher levels of investment in research and development expenditures two years prior to adoption of a long‐term performance plan, and experience increases in the ratio of debt to total assets in the two year period prior to long‐term performance plan adoption. Also, firms increase their investments in research and development and capital expenditures following adoption of long‐term performance plans.     

SOME NEW EVIDENCE ON WHY COMPANIES USE CONVERTIBLE BONDS

The popular argument for convertibles holds that they provide issuers with "cheap" debt and allow them to sell equity at a premium over current value. Objecting to the "free lunch" implied by such an argument, financial economists have offered other explanations that show how the combination of debt and equity built into convertibles can serve to reduce information and agency costs faced by companies and their investors.
In this article, the authors use the results of their recent study to reconcile the two positions. Following Jeremy Stein's view of convertibles as "backdoor equity," the authors argue that convertible bond financing is an attractive alternative for companies that have large growth potential but find both conventional debt and equity financing very costly. Such companies are often deterred from funding their capital investments with straight public bonds by their high risk, relatively short track records, and high expected costs of financial distress. At the same time, the information "asymmetry" between management and outside investors can make equity very expensive in such cases. In layman's terms, management may feel that the company's share price does not accurately reflect its growth prospects, or be concerned that the mere announcement of a new equity offering will cause the share price to fall sharply.
To the extent the stock market is persuaded that management's choice of convertibles is based on this combination of promising growth prospects with limited financing options, it is likely to respond more favorably to the announcement of a new convertible offering. The authors furnish evidence in support of this argument by reporting that the market reacts less negatively to those convertible issuers with higher post-issue capital expenditures and higher market-to-book ratios, but with lower credit ratings and higher (post-offering) debt-equity ratios.     

Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Individuum und Kollektiv — aus juristischer Sicht

The insurance contract falls into the category of risk contracts: their essential factor is the formation of a collective. However, from a legal point of view, the single insuree has only an individual relation with his insurer which exclusively binds insurer and insuree. Alone through the concentration of the total number of individual insurance contracts the insurer achieves a balance of risks following the law of large numbers. A ‘collective’ is neither created in a factual nor a legal sense. The term ‘collective’ has been customarily used in order to visualize the phenomenon of a balance of risks following the law of large numbers. The ‘collective’ does not exist legally. More to the point, the insurer accomplishes the balance of risks by following the law of large numbers (Jakob Bernoulli: 1703). The term ‘risk-bearing community’ is not needed in order to solve the problem of the balance of interests between the insurees. Furthermore, it suffices to assure the concerns of the insurees and to provide the permanent fulfilment of the insurance contracts if on the level of civil law the regulations for general terms and conditions (§§ 305–310 BGB), on the level of the law of supervision the legal principle of equal treatment in life- and health insurance (§§ 11 II, 12 IV VAG) are applied. Additionally, the supervision of abusive practices (§§81 ff. VAG) will ensure the enforcement of the aforementioned objectives.     

CEO Ownership and Discretionary Investments

Abstract:  This study investigates empirically the relationship between CEO ownership and discretionary investments such as R&D and capital expenditures. We assert that the under-investment problem is high for R&D-intensive projects, while the over-investment problem is high for capital expenditures because of differences in risk between the two types of investments. Building on the linkages between investments and investment-related agency problems, we hypothesize that the relationship between CEO ownership and investments depends on whether increasing ownership mitigates or exacerbates the under- or over-investment problem. We find a non-linear association between CEO stock ownership and R&D investments; R&D investments increase and then decline across increasing levels of ownership. Further, we find that R&D investments and CEO stock options are positively associated at high levels of option holdings. In contrast, capital expenditures do not vary with CEO ownership (stock or options). Finally, consistent with our underlying assumption, we find that the influence of R&D investments on future firm risk is significantly larger than that of capital expenditures. Our findings indicate that managerial risk aversion affects discretionary investments.     

Expenditure Incidence in Africa: Microeconomic Evidence

In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub‐Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to be most progressive and university education is least progressive. The benefits associated with hospital care are also less progressive than other health facilities. Our results also show that, while concentration curves are a useful way to summarise information on the distributional benefits of government expenditures, statistical testing of differences in curves is important.