AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF STOCK MARKET VALUATION OF CORPORATE PROJECTED PENSION LIABILITIES

This study extends the work of Landsman (1986) by making use of the newly available projected benefit pension obligations (PBO) information. Our analysis documents that investors perceive pension assets and pension liabilities, respectively, as corporate assets and liabilities. We also developed and tested a decomposition model of pension obligations by examining the market valuation of the three components of PBO: vested, non-vested and future salary progression. Our results indicate that future salary progression is indeed considered by market participants as a liability of the firm. The results of the study have important implications for accounting policy making.     

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES

The conceptualization of assets and liabilities is fundamental to an understanding of financial accounting. It is often maintained that assets and liabilities represent economic resources and economic obligations, respectively, but that not all economic resources are assets and not all economic obligations are liabilities — a somewhat confusing state of affairs. This paper presents a schema for distinguishing assets from economic resources and liabilities from economic obligations based on the authoritative literature in the United States, Australia, Canada and Great Britain. The schema should be useful for clarifying certain financial accounting controversies concerning income taxes, leases, pension benefit payments and executory contracts.     

MARKET EXPECTATIONS AND THE VALUATION EFFECTS OF EQUITY ISSUANCE

We examine how the wealth effects of equity offers are influenced by investors' expectation of the equity type (public or private) to be issued. Firms deviating to the public market may be issuing when information asymmetry or agency costs are high, and their wealth effects are more negative than for firms that are anticipated to issue equity publicly. Firms deviating to the private market, however, may signal firm undervaluation or monitoring benefits and experience more positive wealth effects than firms that are expected to issue equity privately. For the private issues, public market accessibility appears to influence the wealth effects.     

RESIDUAL INCOME,REVERSIBILITY AND THE VALUATION OF EQUITY

Using a continuous time reformulation of the Garman & Ohlson (1980) equity valuation model, we show that the linear pricing technologies, which characterize this area of accounting research, are special cases of a more general non-linear pricing relationship. These non-linearities arise from the fact that firms have the option of terminating their production and investment plans, especially if they turn out to be ‘significant’ loss-making ventures. We demonstrate the potential significance of these non-linearities for a parsimonious interpretation of the Ohlson (1995) model based on the assumption that the firm’s residual income stream is generated by the Student distributions of Praetz (1972) and Blattberg & Gonedes (1974). These processes are based on the assumption that the residual income variable is generated by an elastic (or mean reverting) random walk whose increments have a variance that depends on its current instantaneous value. Since several other well-known processes are nested within the Student distributions (e.g. random walk, Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process), they are a very useful set of distributions through which to demonstrate the potential impact of non-linearities on the pricing relationships of this area.