THE RELATION AMONG DIVIDEND POLICY,FIRM SIZE,AND THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF EARNINGS ANNOUNCEMENTS

In this paper we investigate the role of dividends in explaining the size effect. The previous literature concludes that before the firm's earnings announcement, small firm stock prices impound less information than large firm stock prices. This size effect is evidenced by the greater market reaction to small firm earnings announcements than to large firm earnings announcements. We find that if the dividend announcement precedes the earnings announcement, no size effect exists. The implication is that the information conveyed by dividend announcements includes the information conveyed to investors in large firms by other information sources. However, if the firm does not pay dividends or if the firm's earnings announcement precedes its dividend announcement, the size effect exists. The implication is that dividends do not completely explain the size effect. That is, there are information sources other than dividends that are exclusively available to investors in large firms, and the information provided by these sources is reflected in the stock price of large firms before the earnings announcement.     

Applied welfare analysis for consumers with commodity income

Summary The paper analyzes the relevance and validity of the economic surplus concept for consumers receiving their income in commodities. For these consumers, such as farmers in developing countries, it is shown that the measure of welfare gains or losses via the area under the Marshallian demand and supply curves may lead to a considerable error. The paper provides boundaries for the error of approximation as a function of the share of the product in the consumer's budget and the income elasticity of demand.     

The effectiveness of electric utility price regulation in the 1970s a stochastic dominance analysis

This paper examines whether electricity price regulation in the United States has been effective during the period January 1969 through December 1977. Because our analysis provides evidence suggesting that the price-setting system has been ineffective, we extended our study to examine the equability among regulated firms as well as the relationship between firms' asset size and return distributions. These latter examinations shed some light on the quality of the accounting information set, which serves as a major input to the price-setting process.     

The Valuation of Stock Purchase Rights as Call Options

The predictability of rights valuation models is tested, viewing the rights as call options. The results show that rights valuation models, on average, overprice the rights. The bias in the model prices of rights found in this paper is opposite to that predicted by Merton. Among several factors considered, possible volatility changes associated with raising capital through a rights offering account for some of the observed pricing deviation. A further regression analysis shows that while the pricing deviation is positively related to both the degree that the rights are in the money and the allocation ratio, it is negatively related to the time to expiration and the daily trading volume of the rights.     

Bonds versus stocks: Investors’ age and risk taking

It has become increasingly popular to advise investors to relocate their funds from a primarily stock portfolio to a primarily bond portfolio as they get older. However, the well-known decision rules such as mean–variance or stochastic dominance rules are unable to explain this common practice. Almost stochastic dominance (ASD) and almost mean–variance (AMV) approaches are used to examine the dominance of stock and bond portfolios. ASD and AMV rules unambiguously support the popular practice of advising higher stock to bond ratio for long investment horizons. Hence, we provide an explanation to the practitioners’ recommendation within the expected utility paradigm.     

The law of one accounting variable

The ‘law of one accounting variable’ is defined in this paper as an extension of ‘the law of one price’. It says roughly that if the future payoffs of two assets are the same (in every state of the world), then the accounting variable of the assets are approximately the same. The paper derives a condition under which this law holds and shows that when the law holds for some accounting variables, these variables can replace betas in the multibeta representation of asset returns, provided some admissibility conditions are satisfied.     

The Impact of Mandatory IFRS Adoption on Equity Valuation of Accounting Numbers for Security Investors in the EU

Motivated by the European Union (EU) decision to mandate application of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) to the consolidated financial statements of all EU listed firms (Regulation (EC) 1606/2002), starting in December 2005, we compare the value relevance of accounting information in 14 European countries in the year prior to and the year of the mandatory adoption of the IFRS. We focus on three accounting information items for which measurements under IFRS are likely to differ considerably from measurements under domestic accounting practices across the EU countries prior to the introduction of the international standards: goodwill, research and development expenses (R&D), and asset revaluation. These three items, selected on an a priori basis, have been shown in previous research to differ in the effect of uncertainty on their future benefits. We use valuation models that include these three variables and in addition the book value of equity and earnings. Overall, our study suggests that the adoption of the IFRS has increased the value relevance of the three accounting numbers for investors in equity securities in the EU. Association tests support our two hypotheses: (1) in the year prior to the mandatory adoption of the IFRS, the incremental value relevance to investors of the three domestic GAAP-based accounting items was greater in countries where the respective domestic standards were more compatible with the IFRS; and (2) the higher the deviation of the three domestic GAAP-based accounting items from their corresponding IFRS values, the greater the incremental value relevance to investors from the switch to IFRS. These associations prevail when considering cross-country differences in the institutional environments, which tend to provide complementary effects.