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According to the market timing theory, firms try to take advantage of windows of opportunity to raise capital by exploiting temporary cost fluctuations of alternative financing sources. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to examine the influence and persistence of market timing in the financing decisions of Brazilian firms that launched IPOs in the period from 2001 to 2011.

We analyze the influence of past market values on the capital structure of these firms, based on the main models proposed by Baker and Wurgler (2002), adapted to reflect the characteristics of Brazilian firms’ financial statements.

We find evidence of market timing, but this behavior is not sufficiently persistent in the period studied to the point of determining these firms’ capital structure. We believe the fact that Brazilian companies rarely carried out follow-on primary equity issues after floating their capital in the period analyzed, due to the presence of more advantageous financing sources (particularly from the national development bank, BNDES), explains the results. Therefore, Brazilian firms appear to be pay heed to different funding sources, in search of windows of opportunity, to guide their financing decisions and determine their capital structures.

The Brazilian capital market has been developing intensely in recent years, making it increasingly relevant to analyze the financing and investment decisions of the country’s listed companies. The Brazilian literature on capital structure is extensive, but few works have addressed the issue of market timing.

Building upon the framework of the tradeoff model of capital structure and motivated by the equity market timing theory, we examine whether equity misvaluation is a source of adjustment “costs” that will affect a firm’s leverage adjustment speed toward target. We also investigate whether the quality of a firm’s long-term growth options will influence the decisions of managers to exploit the mispriced equity to converge to the optimum. Using a sample of listed Taiwanese firms during 1992–2014 and employing the market-to-book decomposition as developed by Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan (2005), we find that overleveraged and overvalued firms demonstrate faster adjustment speed than overleveraged but undervalued firms. Furthermore, controlling for the misvaluation status, high-growth firms converge to target faster than their low-growth counterparts. The effect of growth options on the relation between equity mispricing and adjustment speed does not mirror the effect of financing deficits. With the detailed financial information of the local companies across a rather long time series, this study provides incremental inputs to the literature of capital structure from the determinants of target leverage, the estimation of leverage adjustment speeds, to the identification of the sources of adjustment costs in an emerging market where institutional environment is strikingly different from the US.

Our chapter raises serious questions about the long-term efficiency of stock prices in relation to the realized returns of the underlying corporate real assets. In our large-scale calculations that cover horizons of 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 years, returns on corporate real assets suffer a long-term decline, and have been below the yields of 10-year Treasury bonds since 1973. Real assets that received more external financing from capital markets and institutions actually report even lower realized long-term returns. The decline in realized returns cannot be attributed to declining risks as the volatilities of realized returns have been increasing over time. These surprising results may stimulate fresh debate on the roles and long-term performance of capital markets and institutions.

Strategy is ultimately aimed at creating shareholder value. We examine the relationship among intrinsic (DCF) value, market value, and the value of growth options using a “perfect foresight” model. Our findings suggest that Kester's (1984) initial assessment of growth option values may not hold under alternative valuation models. We highlight important issues in the valuation of growth options related to market expectations, modeling assumptions and estimation methods. The findings suggest that the firm's growth option value depends on three factors, each of which impacts investor expectations: (1) the macroeconomic environment; (2) the industry in which the firm participates; and (3) firm specific factors.

Myopic going concern practice refers to the current audit going concern opinion that a firm is rewarded a favorable going concern opinion as long as it has the capability to satisfy its debt obligation in the following year. We show, via a structural agency problem we develop in the paper, that such a practice has a potential economic cost to the firm. We study Lucent Technologies Inc. in detail for its loss in economic value and also measure the magnitude of this impact with 500 companies. We find that Lucent should have lost its going concern status in 2002 as it had to sell off its assets to meet debt obligations and nearly 18% of the 500 firms suffer some degree of economic loss due to the agency problem.

This paper seeks to accomplish three objectives. First, based on prior research, this paper attempts to infer the value relevance of earnings and equity for firm valuation in the restaurant industry. The second objective is to document the joint information content of earning and equity in firm valuation. Finally, the model tested above is used to evaluate the relevance of capital structure for firm valuation in the static capital structure framework. The empirical results indicate that the incremental R2 associated with earnings was found to be generally less than the incremental R2 associated with equity. The adjusted R2 of the model that included both earnings and equity ranged from 0.54 to 0.77. The results suggest that the addition of capital structure variables have no incremental explanatory power in explaining the market value of firm, in the presence of earnings and equity.

Marketers frequently lament the lack of representation of marketing in the boardroom and the short tenure of CMOs. The most common explanations offered are that marketing is not perceived as a strategic discipline and that marketers do not demonstrate a strong enough understanding of how the business makes money.

Financial accounting is how “score is kept” in terms of business performance. It is, therefore, in the self-interest of marketers to become familiar with financial reporting. Doing so will allow them to understand how marketing activities are recorded. In addition, academic researchers need to understand the meaning of the financial measures that they often use as the metrics of success when researching marketing strategy questions.

This is especially important since financial reporting generally does not recognize assets created by marketing investments. In order to substantiate a claim that “brands are assets”, marketers must be able to explain how the financial accounting rules misrepresent economic reality and why managers might use a different set of principles for management reporting.

We argue that the misrepresentation of market-based assets has two forms of negative impact for marketers: external and internal. The external problems are that financial statements are not especially informative about the value of marketing for the providers of capital and do not provide a true portrait of the economic resource base of the company. The internal problems are that marketers cannot point to valuable assets that they are creating, nor can they be effectively held accountable for the way that these assets are managed given that the assets are not recorded.

We do not expect immediate radical changes in financial reporting because financial accounting rules are designed with the specific interests of the suppliers of capital (debt and equity) in mind. To influence financial accounting developments, such as encouraging greater disclosure of marketing activity in the notes to the published accounts, marketers must be able to communicate in language understood by accountants and the current users of financial accounts. To aid this we provide guidance for marketers on the purpose and practices of accounting. We also discuss how academic marketing researchers might wish to adjust financial accounting data to capitalize a proportion of marketing expenses for companies where marketing is a primary driver of business performance.

Krull (2004) finds that US multinational corporations (MNCs) increase amounts designated as permanently reinvested earnings (PRE) to maximize reported after-tax earnings and meet earnings targets. We extend this research by examining the relationship between executive equity compensation and the opportunistic use of PRE by US MNCs, and the market reaction to earnings management using PRE designations. Firms use equity compensation to incentivize executives to strive for maximum shareholder wealth. One unintended consequence is that executives may engage in earnings management activities to increase their equity compensation. In this study, we examine whether the equity incentives of management are associated with an increased use of PRE. We predict and find strong evidence that the changes in PRE are positively associated with the portion of top managers' compensation that is tied to stock performance. In addition, we find this relationship to be strongest for firms that meet or beat forecasts, but only with the use of PRE to inflate income, suggesting that equity compensation incentivizes managers to opportunistically use PRE, especially to meet analyst forecasts.

Further, we provide evidence that investors react negatively to beating analysts' forecasts with the use of PRE, suggesting that investors find this behavior opportunistic and not fully convincing. This chapter makes an important contribution to what we know about the joint effects of tax policy, generally accepted accounting principles, and incentive compensation on the earnings reporting process.