Despite accounting conservatism and indicating the firm's required return exceeds its return on equity, equity book values greater than market values (BTM 1) are not rare. The question we address is why. We find BTM 1 is pervasive and persistent. More importantly, BTM 1 is not attributable to...

Shared concerns about their firm's financial condition by managers, stockholders, lenders and employees create continual inquiries and recurrent attempts to answer the incessant question about how financial distress can be predicted or what reveals the bankruptcy of firms. Despite numerous...

"What is a company really worth?" is a question asked repeatedly during the recent financial crisis. Attention has been focused on short-term valuation issues, like the "mark-to-market" controversy. Sorting out these issues is complicated by the fact that the market puts a value on shareholder...

We decompose the difference between a firm's market value and book value into two components: reproducible intangible assets that can be created by competing firms through SG&A/R&D expenditures, and the residual denoted as franchise value which includes the value of transient-rents from...