Do disclosures of customer metrics lower investors' and analysts' uncertainty but hurt firm performance?

Investors, analysts, and regulators frequently advocate greater disclosure of nonfinancial information, such as customer metrics. Managers, however, argue that such metrics are costly to report, reveal sensitive information to competitors, and therefore will lower future cash flows. To examine these counterarguments, this study presents the first empirical examination of the prevalence and consequences of backward- and forward-looking disclosures of customer metrics by manually coding 511 annual reports of firms in two industries, telecommunications (365 reports) and airlines (146 reports). The results reveal significant heterogeneity in the disclosure of customer metrics across firms and between industries. On average, in both industries, firms make more backward-looking than forward-looking disclosures. Notably, forward-looking disclosures of customer metrics are negatively associated with investors’ uncertainty in both industries and with analysts’ uncertainty in the telecommunications industry. Importantly, the results do not support the managerial thesis that such disclosures have a negative impact on future cash flows. </jats:p

Empirical Essays on Finance and Innovation

This dissertation consists of three empirical studies in finance and innovation. I study various financial factors affecting innovation such as stock market manipulation and public to private transaction. I also investigate the effect of ownership structure on these public to private transactions. The first study finds that the End-of-day price manipulation is associated with short-termism of the firms orientation, long-term harm to a firms equity values, and commensurate with reduced incentives for employees to innovate. Insider trading, by contrast, enables innovators to achieve exacerbated profits from innovation. Using a sample of suspected manipulation events for all stocks from nine countries over the years 2003-2010, I find evidence consistent with these real impacts of market manipulation on innovation. These findings are not attributable to bad firms innovating less and manipulating more, since the average firm subjected to manipulation in the sample is more innovative during the pre-manipulation period. The second study investigates the effect of going private buyout transactions on the investments in innovation using an international sample of buyout transactions from 36 countries over 1997 to 2011. Patent counts and citations are used to proxy for quantity, quality and economic importance of innovation. The data indicate that the effect of buyouts on innovation is quite sizable in terms of quantity and quality, as both patent counts and citations drop following a buyout. I also find that the number of radical patents (i.e. more scientific) drop as well. When we split the sample into institutional and management buyouts the negative association is only confirmed for institutional buyouts. We find that the negative effect of buyouts on innovation is aggravated in post-2006 period, suggesting that the nature of deals has worsened for innovation over time. The data also show that buyouts have a negative effect on innovation efficiency. The third study considers ownership structure of target firms that are subject to going private buyout transactions, which are often highly leveraged and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. In this study, I examine ownership structure prior to going private transactions in 33 countries around the world from 2002 to 2014.The data indicate strong and consistent evidence that pre-going private ownership is characterized by higher institutional and corporate ownership. Family ownership lowers the probability of a public to private transaction. Stronger creditor rights increase the probability of going private particularly for whole company and institutional buyouts

Governance Mechanisms and Shareholder Value

Corporate governance scholars have emphasized monitoring by institutional investors as a primary mechanism for resolving agency problems. However, the shareholders of acquiring firms experienced substantial wealth destruction during the M&A wave in the late 1990s in spite of increasing institutional ownership. I hypothesize that this paradox is due to behavioral difference in two categories of institutional investors (transient vs. dedicated). Empirically, I find that transient institutional investors encouraged M&A activities even during the unproductive, value-destroying M&A wave in the late 1990s. Furthermore, the level of transient institutional investors' ownership was negatively related to M&A performance measured by cumulative abnormal returns. By contrast, dedicated institutional investors did not significantly impact M&A performance. Overall, results suggest that during merger waves the monitoring by transient institutional investors fails to prevent shareholder value destruction and may actually encourage it.Doctor of Philosoph

Essays on When More is More and Less is Less: Marketing Investments and Productivity, Firm Value, and Stock Market

Understanding marketing accountability has been of great interest to business scholars and practitioners. To obtain deeper insights, I investigate the links between marketing investments, marketing productivity, and firm value. I specifically focus on a merger and acquisition where both budget and productivity adjust to align with marketing strategy. I use mergers as a context for the investigation of the dynamic and outcomes of marketing as a financial investment. As such, the empirical approach and managerial implication are not limited to mergers and acquisitions. The results can be extended to other circumstances, such as managerial change and any economic or structural shocks (for example, divestitures, IPO, SEO, alliances, and joint ventures) and to other strategic decisions of a firm under the circumstances in which the necessity of aggressive marketing competes with financial inflexibility.Doctor of Philosoph

The Stock Market in the Driver's Seat! Implications for R&D and Marketing

The budgets for research and development (R&D) and marketing should be determined by managers to attain product market advantages. However, in response to investor expectations for short-term stock returns, managers may modify these budgets myopically to avoid unexpected short-term earnings shortfalls, at the cost of long-term profitability. We propose that the past behavior of firm stock returns and volatility may create investor expectations of short-term financial performance, which drives managers to modify either R&D or marketing budgets or both. In the context of high-technology firms, a Bayesian vector autoregression model, supported by content analysis, shows that few firms exhibit high levels of managerial myopia by simultaneously cutting both R&D and marketing budgets; instead, firms display moderate myopic reactions, in the form of unanticipated decreases in R&D budgets but increased budgets for marketing functions. The tendency to manage myopically in response to past stock returns and volatility increases as firm size or industry concentration decrease. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.finance, marketing, research and development

Three Essays on the Role of Corporate Governance in Firms' Spending on R&D and Controlling Earnings-Management Practices: The Role of Independent Directors’ Tenure and Network in Controlling Earnings-Management Practices; The Impact of Board Diversity on the Corporate Propensity to R&D Spending; The Association between Directors’ Multiple-Board Sittings, Tenure, Financial Expertise, and R&D Spending

This thesis comprises three research essays. The study documents empirical evidence around the research themes by analysing a sample of the UK’s listed non-financial firms from 2005 to 2018. It applied panel data analysis (fixed or random effects) techniques and the potential endogeneity issue is controlled by using the two-step system, GMM. Earnings-management research holds that manipulating a firm's real activities is more damaging to its long-term growth and value than accruals manipulation. Therefore, by building on agency theory and emphasising board monitoring, first essay investigates the role of independent directors’ tenure and connection to several boards in controlling real earnings management (REM). This study finds that independent directors elected to board before appointment of current CEO are negatively associated with the level of REM. Furthermore, this research provides evidence that REM is higher in those firms whose INDs are connected to several boards at a time. Though economically insignificant in most of the models, this research also shows that the association between INDs’ tenure and REM varies with the phases of their tenure. Directors in the early stage of their tenure are observed as being less effective in controlling REM. However, as INDs’ tenure grows, they employ better oversight over management's conduct, thereby reducing REM. Contrary to this, the extended tenure of INDs is associated with higher REM. These results collectively suggest that the board monitoring role protects the stakes of shareholders/stakeholders by constraining REM; when INDs are free from the influence of CEO, they are not over-committed due to their presence on several boards, and they have moderate board tenure which is neither too short nor too long. Furthermore, drawing on collective contributions and group performance perspectives, second essay explores the role of board diversity in the firm’s R&D investment decisions. Additionally, building on a fault-line argument about a team's demographic attributes, the current research decomposes the impact of demographic and cognitive diversity on R&D spending. The research observes a positive relationship between board diversity and the level of R&D spending. Moreover, this research documents that cognitive diversity is positively associated with R&D investment. However, demographic diversity has an insignificant relationship with firms’ spending on R&D projects. Further, this study confirms that demographic diversity negatively moderates the relationship between cognitive diversity and R&D investment. These results suggest that the board's attributes as a group carry the significance to influence the decisions having strategic importance. The findings on the sub-dimensions of board diversity imply that board functional/cognitive diversity is more relevant to corporate decisions and outcomes than is demographic diversity. Based on the monitoring perspective (agency theory) and resource provision view (resource dependency theory), third essay investigates the role of independent directors’ specific attributes in the corporate propensity to R&D investment. The study documents a positive association between INDs’ moderate (median) tenure and the firm’s spending on R&D projects, but early and extended tenure is observed as being insignificant. INDs with a presence on three or fewer boards are observed to promote R&D investment. However, INDs sitting on more than three boards negatively affect the firm’s propensity to invest in R&D initiatives. Financially expert INDs are negatively associated with corporate R&D investments, suggesting that such directors may resist funding these projects beyond optimal risk level because of their expertise. These results suggest that INDs’ monitoring and advising competence improves as they spend time on the firm’s board, but that extended tenure is counterproductive as it impairs INDs’ impartiality. Furthermore, INDs’ capital (resources) accruing from connection to multiple boards is only beneficial for the firm’s strategic decisions if their monitoring role is not compromised because of their over-commitment (busyness).Mirpur University of Science and Technology (MUST