Intangible assets are regarded as the future value drivers of company performance. However hardly anything is known about the actual importance and influence of intangible assets. To fill this gap we analyze the German stock market index DAX and accomplish a survey of the German Certified Public...

This paper introduces a cross-country law and finance analysis of the misreporting behavior in the hedge fund industry in terms of smoothing returns so that a fund consistently generates positive returns. We find strong evidence that international differences in hedge fund regulation are...

The expected time- and risk-adjusted cumulative return on any asset equals one at all horizons. Nonetheless, I show that a typical asset's realized time- and risk-adjusted cumulative return tends to zero almost surely. As a corollary, the value of a typical long-dated asset is driven by extreme...

Start-up firms typically produce negative cash flows in the first years after their foundation. As a consequence, standard discounted cash flow methods are not applicable, often forcing practioneers into using theoretically dissatisfying devices like multiples. In this paper, we develop a...

Presentation to the Singapore Shipping Association and at Nanyang Technological University. Basics of financial statements, what is valuation, valuation ratios, cash flow, asset-based, other issues and metrics

This study provides evidence of significant biases in multi-year management forecasts by analyzing a proprietary dataset on venture-backed start-ups in Germany. We find that revenues and expenses are highly overestimated in each of the investigated one- to five-year-ahead planning periods....

Llano-Ferro (2009) proposes a solution to avoid 'significant errors' when the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC) obtained by the standard formula leads to significant errors in Net Present Value of the Firm calculations; particularly in those that apply to perpetual cash flow series. In...

This paper presents an approach for assessing turnaround opportunities that entails both pre- and post-turnaround valuation considerations, as well as exit planning. The approach is illustrated by way of the Scott Paper Company (Scott) turnaround. In April of 1994, Scott appointed “Chainsaw”...

Consolidation of banks is driven by the objective of leveraging the synergies of geographical diversification, increased efficiency, cost savings and economies of scale. Being banking is an important component of the financial system; these structural changes can potentially have public policy...