Fundamental Investment Analysis

The paper demonstrates empirically that GAAP earnings have properties to serve as a substitute for dividends in equity valuation analysis. Dividends reduce subsequent GAAP earnings, and "intrinsic" equity prices calculated by forecasting earnings are thus reduced by current dividends. This is in accordance with the Miller and Modigliani principle—the displacement property—which states that the payment of dividends reduces prices, dollar for dollar.

In the past two decades there has been an explosion in the use of derivative securities by investors, corporations, mutual funds, and financial institutions. Exchange traded derivatives have experienced unprecedented growth in volume while "exotic" securities (i.e., securities with nonstandard payoff patterns) have become more common in the over-the-counter market. Using the most widely accepted financial models, there are many types of securities which cannot be priced in closed-form. This void has created a great need for efficient numerical procedures for security pricing.

A methodology to price American options with finitely many exercise opportunities simulates the evolution of underlying assets via random trees that branch at each of the possible early exercise dates. From these trees, two consistent price estimates are obtained, one biased high and one biased low. These two estimates can be combined to provide a valid, though conservative confidence interval for the option price.

Simulation has proved to be a valuable tool for estimating security prices for which simple closed form solutions do not exist. In this paper we present two direct methods, a pathwise method and a likelihood ratio method, for estimating derivatives of security prices using simulation. With the direct methods, the information from a single simulation can be used to estimate multiple derivatives along with a security's price. The main advantage of the direct methods over re-simulation is increased computational speed.

Theoretical work on financing costs under asymmetric information has linked shifts in firms' internal funds and investment spending, holding constant investment opportunities. An impediment to convincing tests of these models is the lack of firm-level data on the relative cost of internal and external funds. We use a tax experiment, the surtax on undistributed profits in the 1930s, to identify firms' relative cost of internal and external funds by calculating surtax margins.

This article addresses the problem of valuing American call options with caps on dividend-paying assets. Since early exercise is allowed, the valuation problem requires the determination of optimal exercise policies. Options with two types of caps are analyzed: constant caps and caps with a constant growth rate. For constant caps, it is optimal to exercise at the first time at which the underlying asset's price equals or exceeds the minimum of the cap and the optimal exercise boundary for the corresponding uncapped option.

The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of differences between revised IASC standards (extant in 1994) and U.S. GAAP. With the assistance of Coopers & Lybrand L.L.P., the author restated the group accounts of a sample of eight companies in a variety of industries: six Continental European companies and two companies based in Australia and New Zealand. The companies' annual reports for 1992 or 1993, as supplemented by research conducted by the companies themselves, were used to construct reconciliation tables between the revised IASC standards and U.S. GAAP.

We examine associations between accounting measures of earnings and stock returns in Japan over varying window lengths and compare them to those for the United States. Our results are consistent with the view that Japanese investors utilize less accounting information in their pricing of equities than do their U.S. counterparts. This was particularly evident in the 'boom' period of the mid to late 1980s when the fundamental values conveyed by accounting measures appear to have been largely ignored.

In this study we compare the value relevance of accounting measures for U.S. and German firms matched on industry and firm size, and evaluate the incremental informativeness of earnings adjusted on the basis of a formula proposed by analysts.