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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of equity market misvaluation on manager behavior. Using a sample of 535 French-listed over 2000–2018, the authors analyze whether corporate investment decision is sensitive to equity market overvaluation.

The study adopts market-to-book (M/B) decomposition developed by Rhodes-Kropf and Viswanathan (2004, RKV) that proxies for market misvaluation at the firm and industry levels. The authors conducted a long-term performance analysis via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors tested the relationship between equity misvaluation, corporate investment decisions and equity issuance. The authors ran several robustness tests.

The empirical results show that equity market misvaluation affects corporate investment positively as the stock price deviates further away from its fundamental. Based on market timing theory, the authors find that corporate investment occurs in periods of high valuation motivated by equity issuance to benefit from the low cost of capital. This effect is more prominent for financially constrained firms. Consistent with the catering channel, the authors find that the misvaluation-investment nexus is more pronounced in firms with short-horizon investors. By examining the stocks’ long-term performance of misvalued firms, via a sorting portfolio procedure, the authors find that undervalued firms outperform and generate higher abnormal returns (Jensen’s alpha) than overvalued firms, suggesting that mispricing-driven investment appear to be short-lived and lead to lower return in the long term.

Corporate decision-makers and governance structures should pay attention to the rationality of the corporate investment decision in the context of equity market misvaluation. Managers who focus on maximizing the stock market value in the short-run at the expense of its long-term performance must give preference to value-creating investment, not driven by an external mechanism such as equity market mispricing. More generally, investors and portfolio managers must take into account the market mispricing process in decision-making. Nonetheless, from the portfolio sorting perspective, decision-makers must act in terms of high governance quality to mitigate suboptimal investment due to stock market mispricing (Jensen, 2005). Finally, equity market overvaluation, leading managers to invest via equity financing in particular, should be a signal to attract investors’ attention to seize the window of opportunity and embark on a short-term portfolio strategy. Such a strategy promises high returns in the short term.

This paper investigates jointly two theoretical channels: equity market timing and catering. The authors propose for the analysis three components of the M/B decomposition to dissociate market misvaluation at the firm and industry level from the fundamental component of market value (growth). This procedure provides a better understanding of the role of firm and industry misvaluation in explaining corporate investments. The authors provide evidence of the equity market misvaluation via a portfolio sorting procedure and a Carhart (1997) four-factor pricing model. The authors examine the effect of misvaluation on both the investment and the financing decisions.

The paper aims to provide empirical evidence of the impact of IFRS adoption on the value relevance of accounting information in the emerging market of Saudi Arabia.

The sample consists of 98 non-financial listed firms operating in Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2019, representing the years before and after IFRS adoption. The authors apply basic and extended price models to examine the value relevance of select accounting figures.

The authors findings provide evidence that accounting information is, generally, value relevant to the Saudi Arabian capital market. However, mixed results exist for particular accounting variables. Both earnings and cash flows are value-relevant in the period before and after IFRS adoption; equity is only relevant in the post-adoption period. Furthermore, IFRS adoption also increases the explanatory power of earnings. An increase in the value relevance of earnings and equity hurts the value relevance of cash flows. The effects are moderated by leverage and dividend policy.

The authors contribute to the ongoing discussion of the economic effects of IFRS adoption in emerging markets. The empirical findings show that initial concerns about IFRS adoption, as reflected by the negative coefficient within the regression analysis, are mitigated once the usefulness of the individual accounting variables published in financial statements is investigated.

This chapter focuses on testing optimal capital structure theory: The role of intervening variable debt to equity ratio (DER) on the influence of the financial performance, Ownership Structure of Independent Board of Commissioners (IBCO), Audit Committee (ACO), and Institutional Ownership on Firm Value. The research design was explanatory research using path analysis. Using purposive sampling, 61 manufacturing companies, observation period from 2014 to 2018 with 286 N samples. The research novelty empirically can prove the role of intervening variable DER on the effect of return on assets (ROA) on firm value and shows the market response to the ROA is fully reflected by DER, indicating the existence of an optimal capital structure. The role of DER on the effect of ROE and IBCO on firm value is a partial mediation with the inverse direction. This phenomenon shows that the mechanism of forming a balance between the responses of investors and creditors relates to debt financing.

We explore the impact of equity liquidity on a firm’s dynamic leverage adjustments and the moderating impacts of leverage deviation and target instability on the link between equity liquidity and dynamic leverage in the UK market.

In applying the two-step system GMM, we estimate our model by exploring suitable instruments for the dynamic variable(s), i.e. lagged values of the dynamic term(s).

Our analyses document that a firm’s equity liquidity has a positive impact on the speed of adjustment (SOA) of its leverage ratio back to the target ratio in the UK market. We also demonstrate that the positive relationship between liquidity and SOA is more pronounced for firms whose current position is relatively close to their target leverage ratio and whose target ratio is relatively stable.

This study provides important implications for both firms’ managers and investors. Particularly, firms’ managers who wish to increase the leverage SOA to enhance firms’ value need to give great attention to their equity liquidity. Investors who want to evaluate firms’ performance could also consider their equity liquidity and leverage SOA.

We are the first to enrich the literature on leverage adjustments by identifying equity liquidity as a new determinant of SOA in a single developed country with many differences in the structure and development of capital markets, ownership concentration and institutional characteristics. We also provide new empirical evidence of the joint effect of equity liquidity, leverage deviation and target instability on leverage SOA.

This study aims to investigate the equity market reaction to sustainability disclosure measures derived from firms' inaugural sustainability reports following the implementation of mandatory sustainability reporting in Singapore.

This study explores the equity market reaction to first-time sustainability reports of mandatory adopters and compares the reactions between voluntary and mandatory adopters. To mitigate any imbalanced distribution effects, entropy balancing techniques are employed.

The author observes a significant equity market reaction when mandatory adopters adhere to a reporting framework and release sustainability reports as standalone documents. Additionally, the study indicates that government regulation amplifies the equity market reaction for companies that include a board statement within their sustainability reports and present them as standalone publications.

The lack of quantitative information disclosed in the first-time sustainability reports may restrict the generalizability of the findings.

The findings provide valuable insights for organizations and managers to evaluate the market's response to sustainability disclosures and improve communication effectiveness with investors. Furthermore, the study has direct policy implications for global standard-setting organizations in sustainability reporting. The findings support the notion that investors value market-led and investor-focused sustainability disclosures.

The study contributes to the limited body of research that examines the capital market effects of mandatory sustainability disclosures. To the author’s knowledge, this is among a few studies to directly investigate the equity market reaction to mandatory sustainability disclosures at the firm level.

The purpose of this study is twofold. On the one hand, it studies the impact of IFRS 9 adoption on the firm value; and on the other hand, it investigates the impact of the classification of financial assets on the firm value.

The study covers a sample of 55 listed banks in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region. Data is collected for three years (2017–2019).

The findings show that banks’ value is not impacted by IFRS 9 adoption but by financial assets’ classification. Firm value is positively affected by fair value through other comprehensive income assets, while it is negatively affected by amortized cost and fair value through profit or loss assets. The results of the additional analysis show consistent outcomes.

This research reveals important managerial implications. Priority should be given to the financial assets’ classification strategy following the adoption of IFRS 9 to boost the market valuation of banks. It may be useful for investors, managers and regulators in their decision-making.

This study enriches previous research as IFRS 9 is a new standard, and its adoption consequences need to be investigated. A few recent studies have focused on IFRS 9 as a whole or on other parts of IFRS 9, namely, the impairment regime and hedge accounting and concern developed contexts. However, this research adds to the knowledge of capital market studies by investigating the application of IFRS 9 in terms of classification in the MENA region.

The paper investigates if the process that led to the birth of the Euro Area had a significant impact in homogenizing the capital structure decisions of European firms since the first introduction of the common currency.

A large sample of firms was constructed, and a Tobit-censored regression model was utilized to investigate the determinants of firms' observed capital structures. The Black–Scholes–Merton model was used to infer market values of assets, as well as the volatility of those values, from the observed market values of equity and the corresponding volatility. The existing differences in national tax rules were considered for estimating firm-specific marginal tax rates.

It was found that, despite the currency union and the institutional harmonization process, certain factors still play a different role. In particular, the impact of profitability is consistent with the pecking order view in some countries, and with the trade-off theory in others. Assets risk, measured as the annualized volatility of the market enterprise value, is the best predictor of observed leverage ratios. The sector of activity is significant in determining leverage decisions even when assets' risk is taken into account. Despite the monetary union and the increased financial and institutional integration in the Euro Area, the country of origin still plays a significant role in capital structure decisions, suggesting that other country-level factors may affect firms' financing behaviour.

The paper indicates that, despite the long harmonization process of institutions, regulations and public budget required to join the Euro, firms' financing decisions are still affected by country-specific factors once the common currency is introduced. Therefore, new entrant countries in the Euro area should not expect their companies to immediately conform with those located in other countries within the common currency area.

This article investigated the impact of the currency change from national currencies to the Euro on the determinants of capital structure choices. It was shown that, despite the long harmonization process that led to the birth of the Euro Area, national factors still affect firms' financing decisions. This provides guidance for policymakers in countries that are planning to join the Euro about the impact this will have on firms' financing decisions in the entrant country.

The study assess the selection ability and market timing skills of mutual fund and unit trust managers in Ghana.

The study uses an improved survivorship bias-free dataset of yearly after-fee returns of all mutual funds and unit trusts operating in Ghana from January 2011 to December 2019, cumulating in nine years of quantitative fund data. The authors assess Mutual funds and Unit trusts that ever existed, “alive” or “dead,” over the sample period in the study. The authors construct factor loadings to enable the application of multifactor models in the analysis. The authors apply the unconditional versions of the Jensen alpha, Fama-French three-factor, and Carhart four-factor models to determine the selection ability and market timing skills of 32 mutual funds and 17 unit trusts. The authors deploy HAC-consistent robust standard errors to the OLS estimations to subdue the effect of heterogeneity and autocorrelation.

The results indicate that, on average, mutual funds and unit trust managers possess market timing skills but no selection ability. When the results are decomposed into fund types, fixed-income and balanced mutual fund managers possess selection ability and market timing skills.

To the authors' best knowledge, this study is the earliest to examine the selection ability and market timing skills of both mutual fund and unit trust managers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It is also the earliest to construct factor loadings for the Ghana stock market.

This paper investigates the impact of financial integration on the capital structure of the firms operating in mainland China, examining the firm-level and country-level integrating variables for 2,878 listed Chinese firms over the period of 1991–2016 in regard to the firms' capital structures. Finally, the study revisits the associations for the state-owned and multinational firms in the context of China.

A large sample of unbalanced data from firms were used to explore the relationship firm-level and country-level integrating variables has with firm leverage and maturity; this is accomplished using the fixed effect model. For robustness, a system-generalised method of moments was used.

The results indicate that internationalisation positively impacts the leverage and debt maturity of all listed Chinese firms and multinational firms and that state-owned firms are financed mainly by the state. For country-level integration, the authors find that credit and equity markets are negatively related to a firm's leverage. A negative relation with credit markets suggests that Chinese firms have much cheaper financing options than the benefits that arise from credit market integration. Moreover, the effect of equity market integration is more pronounced on Chinese firms' capital structure and debt maturity than credit market integration.

The results provide valuable implications of financial integration for policymakers as well as capital structure decision-making for managers in China.

Few studies have examined the impact of integration on firms' capital structures in developing countries. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, this study adds new multilevel integration evidence on the capital structure of Chinese firms.

This study aims to investigate how the intangible intensive nature of firms affects the value relevance of earnings and the book value of equity between profit- and loss-reporting firms. The study also examines how firms’ intangible intensity affects the value relevance of R&D outlays between profit- and loss-reporting firms.

An empirical analysis based on Ohlson’s (1995) framework is used. A total of 54,421 firm-year observations of Indian listed firms from financial years 1992–2016 constitute the study sample.

The findings suggest that the difference in the value relevance of earnings and the book value of equity between profit- and loss-reporting firms is more significant in non-intangible intensive firms than in intangible firms. Specifically, earnings are more value relevant in profit-reporting and non-intangible intensive firms, whereas book value of equity is more value relevant in loss-reporting and intangible intensive firms. The results also suggest that the difference in the incremental value relevance of R&D information between profit- and loss-making firms is higher in intangible intensive firms than in non-intangible intensive firms.

The findings of this study can help managers, standard-setters and investors make effective decisions.

This study offers insights into the impact of intangible intensity on the value relevance of aggregated and disaggregated accounting information between profit- and loss-making firms in institutional settings where capitalization of R&D expenditures is allowed.