Remarks on the Measurement, Valuation, and Reporting of Intangible Assets

A paper presented at the July 2002 conference Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century, cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics

Investor Sentiments, Ill-Advised Acquisitions and Goodwill Impairment

We hypothesize that the root cause of many goodwill write-offs - managers' public admission of ill-advised corporate acquisitions - is the overpriced shares of buyers at acquisition. Overpriced shares provide managers with strong incentives to invest, and particularly to acquire businesses, even at excessive prices and doubtful strategic fit, in order to "buy themselves out" of the overpriced share predicament and postpone the inevitable price correction by portraying continued growth. We corroborate our hypothesis by documenting: (1) share overpricing is strongly and positively associated with the intensity of corporate acquisitions, (2) share overpricing is negatively related to the post-acquisition share performance of buyers, beyond the price correction, indicating a negative relation between overpricing and the quality of acquisitions, (3) share overpricing is positively related to the size of goodwill write-offs. We further show that share overpricing predicts both goodwill write-offs and their magnitude, and that acquisition by overpriced companies is a losing proposition for shareholders. Finally, we document some of the serious private and social consequences of the ill-advised acquisitions made by overpriced firms. These findings contribute to the accounting literature on business combinations and goodwill, as well as to the finance/economics research on investor sentiments and corporate investmen

The Persistence of the Accruals Anomaly

The accruals anomaly - the negative relationship between accounting accruals and subsequent stock returns - has been well documented in the academic and practitioner literatures for almost a decade. To the extent that this anomaly represents market inefficiency, one would expect sophisticated investors to learn about it and arbitrage the anomaly away. Yet, we show that the accruals anomaly still persists and its magnitude has not declined over time. While we find that institutional investors react promptly to accruals information, it is clear that their reaction is rather weak and is primarily characteristic of active investors who constitute a minority of institutions. The main reason: Extreme accruals firms have characteristics which are unattractive to most institutional investors. Individual investors are by and large unable to profit from trading on accruals information due to the high transaction and information costs associated with implementing a consistently profitable accruals strategy. Consequently, the accruals anomaly persists, and will probably endure

A Rude Awakening: Internet Shakeout in 2000

This study explores the major value-drivers of business-to-consumer ("B2C") Internet companies' share prices both before and after the "bursting of the Internet bubble" in the spring of 2000. Although many market observers had predicted that the bubble would eventually burst (e.g., Perkins and Perkins 1999), the ultimate and previously unanswered challenge lay identifying which stocks would fall and which ones would survive the shakeout. We develop an empirical valuation model and provide evidence that the Internet stocks that this model suggests were relatively over-valued prior to the Internet stock market correction experienced relatively larger drops in their price-to-sales ratios when the bubble burst. This result is robust to the inclusion of competing explanatory variables suggested by the economics literature related to industry rationalizations. We also investigate a number of additional issues related to the rapidly changing Internet world. First, we provide descriptive evidence of the correlation between monthly stock returns and contemporaneous and lagged Nielsen/Netratings web traffic metrics (both levels and changes). We then undertake a factor analysis on the set of Nielsen/Netratings raw web metrics with a view to synthesizing the data into a parsimonious set of orthogonal web performance measures. Our factor analysis results in the extraction of three factors that capture the most relevant dimensions of website performance: (1) reach, (2) "stickiness", and (3) customer loyalty. Our findings suggest that all three web performance measures are value-relevant to the share prices of Internet companies in each of 1999 and 2000. Our findings of significance for the year 2000 contradict the recent claims of some analysts that web traffic measures are no longer important. We also explore the valuation role of our proxy for B2C companies' ability to sustain their current rate of "cash burn" and find that this proxy is a significant value-driver in each of 1999 and 2000. Finally, our results suggest that investors adopted a more skeptical attitude towards expenditures on intangible investments as the Internet sector began to mature. Consistent with the results of prior studies in other knowledge asset based industries, we find that investors appear to implicitly capitalize product development (R&D) and advertising expenses (customer acquisition costs) during the "bubble" period when the market was more optimistic about the prospects of B2C companies. However, neither marketing expenses nor product development costs are implicitly capitalized into value, on average, subsequent to the shakeout in the spring of 2000. Overall, our study provides a preliminary view of the shakeout and maturation of one of the most important New Economy industries to emerge to date - the Internet

Is Doing Good Good for You? Yes, Charitable Contributions Enhance Revenue Growth

A key question concerning socially responsible corporate activities is whether such actions achieve traditional goals, such as profit maximization and shareholder value creation, or whether such activities represent a drain on resources by opportunistic managers. Much of the debate about the legitimacy of and justification for socially responsible activities would be settled if it is convincingly shown that they further traditional business goals. In this study we provide such evidence. Using a large sample of charitable contributions made by public companies from 1989 through 2000, and a statistical methodology that distinguishes causation from association, we document that charitable contributions enhance the future revenue growth of the donors. In particular, we find evidence that, for firms in industries that are highly sensitive to consumer perception, corporate giving is associated with subsequent sales growth. On the other hand, our results do not provide strong evidence that revenue growth drives future charitable giving

R&D Reporting Biases and their Consequences

The immediate expensing of R&D expenditures is often justified by the conservatism principle. However, no accounting procedure consistently applied can be conservative throughout the firm' life. We ask the following questions: (a) When is the expensing of R&D conservative and when is it aggressive, relative to R&D capitalization? and (b) What are the capital market implications of these reporting biases? To address these questions we construct a model of profitability biases (differences between reported profitability under R&D expensing and capitalization) and show that the key drivers of the reporting biases are the differences between R&D growth and earnings growth (momentum), and between R&D growth and return on equity (ROE). Companies with a high R&D growth rate relative to their profitability (typically early cycle companies) report conservatively, while firms with a low R&D growth rate (mature companies) tend to report aggressively under current GAAP. Our empirical analysis, covering the period 1972-2003, generally supports the analytical predictions. In the valuation analysis we find evidence consistent with investor fixation on the reported profitability measures: we detect undervaluation of conservatively reporting firms and overvaluation of aggressively reporting firms. These misvaluations appear to be corrected when the reporting biases reverse from conservative to aggressive and vice versa

R&D Reporting Biases and their Consequences

The immediate expensing of R&D expenditures is often justified by the conservatism principle. However, no accounting procedure consistently applied can be conservative throughout the firm' life. We ask the following questions: (a) When is the expensing of R&D conservative and when is it aggressive, relative to R&D capitalization? and (b) What are the capital market implications of these reporting biases? To address these questions we construct a model of profitability biases (differences between reported profitability under R&D expensing and capitalization) and show that the key drivers of the reporting biases are the differences between R&D growth and earnings growth (momentum), and between R&D growth and return on equity (ROE). Companies with a high R&D growth rate relative to their profitability (typically early cycle companies) report conservatively, while firms with a low R&D growth rate (mature companies) tend to report aggressively under current GAAP. Our empirical analysis, covering the period 1972-2003, generally supports the analytical predictions. In the valuation analysis we find evidence consistent with investor fixation on the reported profitability measures: we detect undervaluation of conservatively reporting firms and overvaluation of aggressively reporting firms. These misvaluations appear to be corrected when the reporting biases reverse from conservative to aggressive and vice versa