Organization

by Matthew Shaffer, Harvard Business School.

In U.S. M&A transactions, target directors are effectively required to seek and consider a “fairness opinion” and supporting valuations before accepting a takeover offer. Despite their legal status, critics have argued that these valuations are biased and sometimes low-quality, and that even unbiased valuations would not be useful to public companies, which can use their pre-deal stock price as an appraisal of their value.

[Read more…] about Truth and Bias in M&A Target Fairness Valuations: Appraising the Appraisals

by KPMG. The thirteenth edition of the study includes 276 companies.

[Read more…] about Cost of Capital Study 2018 (New Business Models – Risks and Rewards)

The Q3 report, “This Train Keeps Rolling,” breaks down private equity activity in 2018 between deal size and sector. While valuations remain near historic highs, multiples have come down slightly in all but the small-market. Still, debt markets and considerable sums of dry powder available to private equity investors have allowed sponsors to pay a considerable premium over strategic acquirers as of the end of Q3.

[Read more…] about Murray Devine Valuation Advisors Publishes Q3 Private Equity Valuations Report

by Kyrre Kjellevold, Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), Department of Accounting, Auditing and Law

Management often relies on specialists for valuing complex fair value measurements (FVMs), auditors frequently rely on those FVMs as audit evidence, and the PCAOB has documented persistent problems in the audit of FVMs. Based on in-depth interviews of Norwegian audit partners and company valuation specialists, I provide evidence on how audit teams interact with company specialists, how company specialists view the work of auditors and auditor specialists, and the extent of pressure company specialists’ experience to conform to management measurement bias.

[Read more…] about Company Valuation Specialists’ Interactions with Management and Auditors: A Field Study

by Ron Alquist, AQR Capital Management LLC / Ronen Israel, AQR Capital Management, LLC / Tobias J. Moskowitz, Yale University, Yale SOM, AQR Capital, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

In the earliest days of empirical work in academic finance, the size effect was the first market anomaly to challenge the standard asset pricing model and prompt debates about market efficiency. The notion that small stocks have higher average returns than large stocks, even after risk-adjustment, was a pathbreaking discovery, one that for decades has been taken as an unwavering fact of financial markets.

[Read more…] about Fact, Fiction, and the Size Effect