The measurement of the economic performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business Sector 1946–1990: an application of the shareholder value creation concept

This paper is based upon a juxtaposition of the cash flow-market value performance (alias SVC performance) and historic cost accounting (HC) performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business sector 1946–90. It has two principal objectives: 1. To determine whether, judged on return and variability dimensions, the HC accounting model is an operationally acceptable surrogate for a multiperiod market-based accounting model. 2. To analyse the consequences of HC income-based distributions, i.e., corporate tax, interest and dividend payments based on conventionally-measured corporate income. Three principal conclusions are drawn: i. Notwithstanding their common cash flow component, HC performance indices are not reliable surrogates for SVC performance criteria. The former apparently do not accurately capture changes in corporate valuation and generally understate the variability of market-based returns. ii. The multiperiod HC income of a going concern characteristically overstates its coterminous multiperiod cash flows to a considerable degree. Contrary to common supposition, the former does not therefore constitute a ‘normalized’ or ‘smoothed’ version of a firm's ‘primitive’ cash flows in the sense that the cumulative (multiperiod) values of the two measures tend to converge. iii. As a consequence of ii, HC income and its near relation, taxable earnings, are dubious bases for measuring interest-paying, tax-paying and dividend-paying capacities. Corporate income-distribution decisions based on HC accruals-based profit measures frequently trigger external financing which may cause shareholder wealth losses and wealth transfers from shareholders to lenders. However, ‘fiscal drag’ appears to be the most serious consequence of HC accruals-based income distribution decisions.     

Qualitative growth and complementary technology: Beyond the technical fix

At present, improved environmental performance and corporate growth work hand in hand as part of a single business strategy. Growth enables the company to invest in environmental technology; environmental technology in turn enables it to grow while holding increases in environmental impact to a minimum. But this ‘Golden Age’ relationship could break down as the environmental benefits of technological advance are overwhelmed by growth in output. For this reason, there is already concern in some industries that the need to protect the environment may lead in due course to regulations designed to suppress further growth. However, any attempt to suppress growth would have extremely severe economic implications, and would require us to address the Growth Enigma: how are the needs of a stable economy and a stable environment to be met at the same time? The concept of ‘qualitative growth’, i.e. corporate strategy based on a reduced rate of growth, is examined with special reference to the airline industry and to Swissair, which has recently announced a qualitative growth strategy. It turns out that the company is not in fact implementing the strategy, but the declaration of intent itself reveals some valuable lessons which may help in a solution to the central problem of growth and the environment.     

Government Time Discounting and Required Rates of Return: UK History and Current Issues

The UK government first set financial objectives for the nationalised industries in 1961 and subsequently promoted the use of ‘discounted cash flow’ for investment appraisal. The nationalised industry regime evolved until, in the 1990s, it was succeeded by economic regulation regimes for the privatised utilities. Meanwhile discounting conventions emerged and have continued to evolve for wider government policy analysis, including aspects of climate change. Issues about the size and functions of public expenditure notwithstanding, UK government conventions are currently fairly uncontroversial: however, in the world at large, government discounting remains subject to many academic and international controversies and misunderstandings.     

Financial Constraints on German Firms after the Crisis: Evidence from Threshold Panel Estimation

This article studies the existence and magnitude of financial investment constraints in Germany between 2006 and 2012 with a special emphasis on small and medium‐sized firms. The core contention is that the sensitivity of the investment rate to the cash flow rate is a function of a firm's financial position contributing to its access to external finance. The application of a nonlinear panel threshold model reveals that the marginal effect of the cash flow rate on the investment rate is almost twice as strong for ‘high debt’ firms compared to ‘low debt’ firms. This result holds for six out of seven balance sheet threshold variables. For a single specification, the results reveal a non‐monotonic relationship between the cash flow rate and investment rate. Firm size, however, does not explain differences in the cash‐flow‐investment nexus.     

An empirical model of mainframe computer investment

This paper introduces a dynamic model of investment decisions in mainframe computer systems. I estimate and test the model using detailed micro data from a company in the telecommunications industry. The model accounts for ‘technological depreciation’ which distinguishes computers from other investment goods where physical depreciation is typically a key factor underlying replacement investment decisions. The company increased its installed mainframe computer capacity by over 30‐fold over the 10‐year sample period. Part of this growth was undoubtedly due to the huge increase in performance and the corresponding drop in the per unit cost of processing capacity of mainframes, a consequence of ‘Moore's law’. However, there was also tremendous growth in the need for computers for billing, account processing and other tasks, due to the rapid growth in the telecommunications industry over this same time period. I estimate the unknown parameters of the investment model using a nonlinear least squares–nested fixed‐point algorithm (NLS‐NFXP), which solves the Bellman equation underlying the dynamic model of investment and replacement of mainframe computers by nonlinear least squares. I demonstrate that it is feasible to estimate this model on an ordinary PC, whereas standard discretization approaches to solving the firm's optimal investment policy might not even be feasible using supercomputers. I show that the estimated model fits the data very well, and accurately captures the large growth in installed mainframe capacity, the timing and magnitude of replacement investment, as well as periodic upgrades of existing mainframe units. I use the model to decompose how much of the 30‐fold increase in mainframe computer capacity is due to ‘Moore's law’ (i.e. the huge drop in the unit cost of installed mainframe capacity), and how much is due to the growth in demand for services of mainframes, due to the rapid growth in demand for telecommunications services (particularly cell phone accounts) by the firm's customers. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

增长、创值、防险:现金流战略管理三维世界

文章就现代企业发展过程中至关重要的增长、创值、风险防范与现代企业战略现金流管理间的关系进行深入探索。现代企业应关注战略现金流的匹配,防范现金流断流的风险,引入新的投资选择理念,方能持续创造价值。     

弱周期性行业盈利稳定性和企业成长性的实证分析——基于医药和食品行业的数据研究

受金融危机影响,世界经济仍在谷底徘徊。弱经济形势下的投资成为一个有讨论价值的问题。国外成熟市场普遍观点认为,相比强周期性行业,弱周期性行业需求弹性小,盈利稳定,发展缓慢,在经济衰弱期应该多投资弱周期性行业。但是这个观点在我国非成熟市场是否成立仍需要数据分析与支持。本文以典型的弱周期性行业食品和医药行业为例,以强周期行业的化工行业进行实证对比分析,选取了2005—2012年三个行业上市公司的财务数据作为样本,就盈利稳定性和企业发展性进行对比分析。对于盈利稳定性,作者认为稳定的现金流、每股收益和权益回报率对于企业盈利稳定性的作用至关重要,还利用标准离差率来体现企业数据的波动程度,建立了相应的评价体系;对于企业成长性,利用资产周转率、销售毛利率等比例,在前人研究的基础上进行了评价模型改进,对各行业企业进行打分,最后得出与成熟市场不同的结论：与强周期性行业相比,食品行业并没有较强的盈利稳定性,医药行业也不是发展缓慢,竞表现出较强的企业成长性。对于研究结果的原因分析,作者认为在我国食品安全问题是食品行业盈利稳定性较差的根本原因,而我国医药行业成长性较强是受基本国情、政府支持和投入等因素的影响。     

Regional patterns and determinants of birth and survival of new firms in Western Germany

This paper documents and assesses the economic performance of metropolitan technology centres in the USA during the business downturn of the early 2000s. We find that many of the USA's leading high-technology centres have performed at or near the national average, but that some of the nation's most prominent technology centres have fared poorly during the downturn, including Silicon Valley. The main factors that accentuated economic decline in technology centres during the recent recession include: a poorly diversified overall economic base; limited diversity within high-technology industries; relatively high (all industry) wages; and high levels of venture capital funding during the end of the ‘boom’ period of the late 1990s. We find that counter to some of the recent literature on regional development and knowledge-based industry clustering and networking, the rules of regional economic development have not changed dramatically with the so-called ‘new economy’. High-technology regions, just as ‘traditional’ industry regions over the past century, are vulnerable to pronounced economic cycles of growth and decline. The cycles can be particularly pronounced if regional economies are not well diversified and labour costs are not moderated during economic downturns. We also find that venture capital can exaggerate rather than moderate regional economic cycles, such as economic growth years in the USA from the late 1990s to the recession of 2001. The model suggests that free-flowing venture capital dollars may result in an over reliance on these funds, at the expense of a sound business model with sustainable growth and reasonable cash flow. Also, business networks associated with venture capital fund flow might be detrimental at critical economic turning points, often resulting in a rush of dollars in a limited business sector, rather than a diversified set of entrepreneurial ventures.     

Extent of diversification and company performance: The New Zealand evidence

This paper confirms the relative superiority of related-diversification in terms of the financial performance of New Zealand companies, companies which are much smaller and less diverse than those which normally feature in this literature. To facilitate comparisons with other studies, financial performance is measured in three ways: return on equity; return on assets; and sales growth. Other independent variables controlled for are company size; risk; leverage; technological opportunity; and industry concentration. The effective rates of protection afforded manufacturing industries (export subsidies and import tariffs) are also confirmed as having had some positive bearing on company performance.     

小议如何解决金融危机对企业经营性现金流的影响

我国会计准则将现金流定义为现金和现金等价物的流入与流出,现金流又可分为经营性现金流、投资性现金流和筹资性现金流。一般而言,经营性现金流能更好地反映公司创造价值的能力,是企业自身创造现金流量能力的反映,应对金融危机冲击,改善经营性现金流状况,需要企业实施稳健的财务策略,建立经营性现金流预算制度,实施经营性现金流预警及控制,减少应收账款和存货,降低生产经营成本,运用延期支付手段,并积极开展对外融资。     

A TEST OF PERFORMANCE SIMILARITY AMONG STRATEGIC GROUP MEMBERS IN CONFORMING AND NON-CONFORMING INDUSTRY STRUCTURES

Empirical tests have produced mixed support for a membership-performance link in strategic groups, perhaps due to incomplete treatment of industry forces. We argue that strategic group concept is more useful for explaining performance differences among firms in some industries (where conditions favour conformity in firm conduct) than others. Using three industry structure constructs as criteria, 47 four-digit SIC industries are classified into ‘conforming’ or ‘non-conforming’ industry samples. Firms are then clustered into strategic groups in a separate treatment for each sample. Performance differences among groups are tested under conforming and non-conforming industry conditions. Tests confirm membership effects on ROA and ROE are significantly stronger in ‘conforming’ industries, where stronger regression relationships between conduct variables and performance also obtain.     

基于Logistic模型的物流业上市公司财务预警

从物流业104家A股上市公司中选取了60家上市公司作为样本,分别用提取主成分构建逻辑回归模型和原指标构建逻辑回归模型的方法进行财务预警研究,得出了以下结论:用聚类分析方法判断上司公司是否处于财务困境能减少误差且更具有现实意义,方便投资者做出投资决策;主成分构建的逻辑回归模型和原指标构建的逻辑回归模型预测效果并无显著差异,构建的Logistic模型预测正确性都在80%左右,预测效果良好;在以后研究物流业上市公司财务预警时,必须考虑选取主营业务收入增长率、流动资产周转率、现金债务总额比和现金流量比率四个财务指标。     

Capital expenditure announcements and anti-takeover barriers

In this paper, we compare capital budget announcements by firms with anti-takeover mechanisms in place to announcements by firms without takeover barriers during the period 1980 to 1995. We find that anti-takeover provisions do not affect investors’ average reactions to investment choices. Market responses are heterogeneous; however, and differ according to size, growth opportunity, the availability of free cash flow and exposure to the capital markets. We find evidence consistent with managerial entrenchment when firms are insulated from the threat of takeover and have enough free cash flow to avoid raising external capital. We also find that for small firms, the reaction to capital investment announcements are positively related to free cash flow when managers have high growth opportunities, but negatively related when investment opportunity is small. This result is consistent with Noe (1988), who shows that restricting managers’ investment choices to positive NPV projects is necessary to obtain the pecking order results of Myers and Majluf (1984).     

金融资产配置、金融杠杆与现金流风险

金融资产会计安排是企业执行金融工具准则的重要环节,具有显著的经济后果。基于实体企业金融化现象,研究金融资产配置与现金流风险关系,分析金融杠杆的调节功能,探讨非效率资本配置的传导作用,研究发现：金融资产配置与现金流风险之间存在U型关系;金融杠杆能够调节金融资产配置与现金流风险的关系,使关系曲线拐点右移与扁平化。区分金融资产配置类型后发现：交易类金融资产与现金流风险呈U型关系;委托贷款等新兴金融资产负向影响现金流风险;投资性房地产和长期金融股权投资未显著影响现金流风险。考虑企业生命周期后发现,成长期与衰退期企业金融资产配置与现金流风险呈U型关系,成熟期企业金融资产配置负向影响现金流风险;按照产权性质分组检验发现,金融资产配置与现金流风险的关系以及金融杠杆的调节效应在非国有企业中更显著;机制检验发现,非效率资本配置在金融资产配置影响现金流风险的过程中发挥中介作用。     

证券投资基金持股与管理者过度投资行为的相关性研究

基于沪深A股上市公司2008年-2010年的研究数据,分析了证券投资基金持股对企业过度投资的影响。研究发现,证券投资基金持股比例与管理者过度投资显著负相关,证券投资基金能有效抑制管理者的过度投资行为;进一步研究发现,证券投资基金持股比例越高,上市公司派发现金股利水平越高,并且证券投资基金持股在一定程度上能够抑制上市公司恶意派现的现象。     

Conducting a sales forecasting audit

Continuous improvement in sales forecasting is a worthy goal for any organization. This paper describes a methodology for conducting a sales forecasting audit, the goal of which is to help a company understand the status of its sales forecasting processes and identify ways to improve those processes. The methodology described here has been developed over a 5-year period, involving multiple auditors, and has been implemented (to date) at 16 organizations. This methodology revolves around three distinct phases: the ‘as-is’ phase, in which the audit team seeks to understand fully a company’s current forecasting process; the ‘should-be’ phase, in which the audit team presents a vision of what world-class forecasting should look like at the audited company, and the ‘way-forward’ phase, in which the audit team presents a roadmap of how the company can change its forecasting processes to achieve world-class levels. Those companies that have responded positively to the audit process have experienced significant improvement in their forecasting performance. The paper concludes by presenting lessons from audits conducted to date, as well as implications for management practice and future research.     

Innovation,market structure and firm size: A simultaneous equations model

This study uses a hwequation model and data for four-digit SIC manufacturing industries to examine the joint endogeneily of output measures of innovation activity and market structure (industry concentration). Its results confirm recent studies finding high concentration to have a negative effect on innovation output (especially smabfinn innovations), and Anding that large-firm innovations and small-finn innovations respond Werently to economic and technological conditions. The study also reveals that, contrary to some previous research, and consistent with modern ‘Schumpeterian’ propositions, innovation output (especially largefirm innovations) has a significant positive effect on industry concentration.     

Performance measurement with expectiles

Financial performance evaluation is intimately linked to risk measurement methodologies. There exists a well-developed literature on axiomatic and operational characterization of measures of performance. Hinged on the duality between coherent risk measures and reward associated with investment strategies, we investigate representation of acceptability indices of performance using expectile-based risk measures that recently attracted a lot of attention inside the financial and actuarial community. We propose two purely expectile-based performance ratios other than the classical gain-loss ratio and the Omega ratio. We complement our analysis with elicitability of expectile-based acceptability indices and their conditional version accounting for new information flow.

     

滨城聚鑫房地产公司开发项目案例

本案例通过对聚鑫房地产公司遇到的项目开发难题进行分析，提出了三种意见，即立即开发、不可开发、观望后做决定。通过对项目收入、成本费用等各方面进行分析、计算，并对项目建成后的经济效果进行预测，帮助学员了解项目投资中需要注意的资本成本、投资风险和现金流量等问题，以把握项目投资的关键点。     

An economic–probabilistic model for risk analysis in technological innovation projects

This paper presents the application of an economic–probabilistic model to conduct risk analysis in technological innovation (TI) projects. The model integrates risk and economic analysis by quantifying both value and probability of occurrence of cash flow deviations, thus resulting in an economic–probabilistic analysis of the expected returns. The main risk categories and factors in TI projects are identified and associated to cash flow groups. The model allows to calculate risk-adjusted values for cash flow groups and project net present value through stochastic simulation. As a result, the model provides both the risk-adjusted project economic return with the associated probability distribution to its NPV and the variability that each risk factor generates in the project return. The model offers important benefits from the point of view of practitioners, including a condensed list of independent risk factors and the use of a monetary scale to assess risk impact which is familiar to most decision makers.