The Stock Market and Corporate Investment: A Test of Catering Theory

In the underlying paper the author re-examines the conservatism principle and its asymmetric effects on earnings. With samples consisting of all firm-year observations from 1963 to 1990 with returns data on the CRSP NYSE/AMEX Monthly files and respective accounting data on the COMPUSTAT Annual Industrial and Research files, he formulates and tests four major hypotheses to find evidence for his predictions. At first he chracterizes “conservatism in accounting as the more timely recognition in earnings of bad news regarding future cash flows than good news”.1 In his first hypothesis he predicts a more sensitive response of earnings towards bad news in comparison to good news, proxied by negative and positve annual stock returns. His second prediction is that earnings are more timely than cash flow, indicating a stronger association of accruals to conservative accounting effects. Hypotheses three and four account for a test on the

The standard statements focus on accounting income for the entire corporation, not cash flows, and the two can be quite different during any given accounting period. However, for valuation purposes we need to discount cash flows, not accounting income. Moreover, since many firms have a number of separate divisions, and since division managers should be compensated on their divisions' performance, not that of the entire firm, information that focuses on the divisions is needed. These factors have led to the development of information that

A company has to find a way to achieve a balance between rewarding managers to the point that it is detrimental to the company and finding a way to maximize the wealth of the shareholders.

For the month of December, I was given an assignment consisting of $100,000 and four stocks to invest in. My four stocks were The Ralph Lauren Corp., Visa Inc., Master card Inc. and The Chevron Corp. As stated I was given a month to record my data and I ended up with a total capital gain of $5,518.36 for the one month period for my investments. I have to thank you Mr. Acker, this project was not difficult, but it did confuse me. Receiving this assignment scared me in a way, because I didn’t know what I was getting into. The finance world is scary and tricky, one minute the market is doing good and other days it would be low. While calculating my capital gains or losses I thought I would lose a larger

Baruch Lev and Feng Gu authors of “The End of Accounting and The Path Forward for Investors and Managers” indicate that over the past 110 years, the structure and content of financial reports has not changed, and that the role that these reports play in influencing the decisions of investors has greatly diminished. Lev and Gu make a case that non-transaction events that are not captured by the financial reports such as those disclosed through 8-k filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) have a greater impact on stock prices, and thus more useful to investors. In addition, they suggest that one of reasons for the decline in usefulness of financial reports stems from the increase of estimates that has made its way into these reports (Lev and Gu 2016).

* Equity value is established for the firm * Current shareholders can diversify personal portfolios

The Castle in the Air theory was introduced by John Maynard Keynes, an well known economist and successful investor of the 1930s. It was Keynes’ theory that the keys to investing came from supernatural or psychic means.

Management and investors are often more interested in the return earned on the funds invested than in the

If the firms funding requirements are larger than their retained earnings, they must issue debt as this is preferred to issuing equity. Based on this theory, a firm’s financing policies could be viewed as signalling management’s view of the firm’s stock value (Wang & Lin 2010).Myers and Majluf (1984) also add that if firms issued no new securities but only used its retained earning to support the investment opportunities, the information asymmetric could be resolved. This suggests that issuing equity turn out to be more expensive as asymmetric information insiders and outsiders increase. Large firms should then issue debt to avoid selling under priced securities. As the requirement for external financing increases, businesses will work down the pecking order, from safe to riskier debt, perhaps to convertible securities or preferred stock, and finally to equity as a last resort. Each firm's debt ratio therefore reflects its cumulative requirement for external financing (Myers 2001).The pecking order theory clarifies why the bulk of external financing comes from debt. It also describes why organizations that are more profitable borrow less: since their goal debt ratio is, low-in the pecking order they do not have a goal since profitable firms have more internal financing available.

So the investor will invest 32.58860806% of the investment budget in the risky asset and 67.41139194% in the risk-free asset.

Segment reporting is integral to the process of investment analysis and there is a common agreement among financial analysts that such information is essential to their work. Previous literature has found that segment information disclosure can increase security valuation and can make future earnings better. It is likely for a firm with diversified geographic and/or business operations,

Using the return regression, where the dependent variable is raw returns and independent variables are raw earnings and earnings surprises, this study will test the association between fair value FV and intangible assets. Moreover, the IAD variable in equation (1A) is added to assess the degree of value

Most of the empirical studies on internal capital markets set the investment behavior of single firms as a benchmark for diversified firms’ investment behavior and mainly use Tobin’s Q as a proxy for investment opportunities. I argue that this approach leads to misleading conclusions about internal capital markets inefficiency in diversified firms, and I also propose another proxy for investment opportunities based on financial analysts’ estimations.

Leading to the problem, some managers have different goals and objectives, for example some manages may want to maximize profits, maximize profits does not equally means maximize firm’s market value. Firstly, this is because maximize profits might need to cutting back on investing on intangible assets. Such as staff trainings, maintenance, research and development etc, but these add long-term value to the firm. Surely shareholders will not be happy when these add short-term value to the firm but causing damages to long-term profits. Also companies might be able to increase their future profit by cutting this year’s dividend and investing the freed-up cash for the firm. This might not be what the shareholders want as well since they get paid

To increase and maximize the wealth/value of shareholders, it is necessary that the company is competitive in their market and can reliably “earn a considerable return on its investments above their cost of capital” (Doyle, 2000). The increasing rates of return of well performing companies attract new investors who invest money to become shareholders. These outside funds from investors are essential for growth of businesses and the expansion into new markets. Measurements of generated shareholder returns over a certain time period deliver the company useful information on whether their objectives have been achieved or should be new adjusted (Atrill, 2009).