New research challenges the accepted wisdom that shunning companies that fail to meet your values puts pressure on them or puts them out of business.
507 firms hold over $1 billion in goodwill with market-to-book ratios below one, suggesting hidden risks. Learn how investors can scrutinize these firms for potential write-downs and what this reveals about corporate governance with insights from Columbia Business School.
CBS Professor Shivaram Rajgopal finds that businesses that claim to be acting in stakeholders’ best interests show no signs of changed behavior.
New research by CBS Professor Shivaram Rajgopal and his co-authors uses historical company data to help investors more accurately estimate a company's value, promoting greater transparency.
In a dynamic setting with demand following a random process, we ask how investment and operating decisions can be delegated to a manager with unknown time preferences. Only the manager observes the demand realization in each period and, therefore, has private information when choosing whether to acquire the productive asset and, subsequently, how to utilize it. We derive accrual accounting-based performance measures under which the manager will make the efficient decisions provided the investment date is exogenously given.
This paper examines the impact of mandatory reporting and auditing of firms' financial statements on industry-wide resource allocation. Using threshold-induced variation in the share of mandated firms in a given industry, I document that reporting mandates facilitate ownership dispersion in capital markets and spur competition in product markets. I, however, do not find that reporting mandates unambiguously improve the efficiency of industry-wide resource allocation. With respect to auditing mandates, I find only that they impose a fixed cost on firms, deterring smaller entrants.
We study the economic consequences of alternative hedge accounting rules in terms of managerial hedging decisions and wealth effects for shareholders. The rules we consider include the "fair-value" and "cash-flow" hedge accounting methods prescribed by the recent SFAS No. 133. We illustrate that the accounting method used influences the manager's hedge decision. We show that under no-hedge accounting, the hedge choice is different from the optimal economic hedge the firm would make under symmetric and public information.
