Copenhagen Business School

About: Copenhagen Business School is a education organization based out in Copenhagen, Hovedstaden, Denmark. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Corporate governance & Entrepreneurship. The organization has 2194 authors who have published 9649 publications receiving 341898 citations.

Accounting, decisions and promises

Abstract: One aim of this paper is to present a new version of the relationship between accounting and decision making going beyond the important but now classical answer, ammunition, learning and rationalisation machines. Another aim is to add to literature about the relationship between accounting and managerial work. This involves a temporal perspective. Decisions are endings which stop a process of decision making, but they are also promises which crate new beginnings. The paper discusses the decision as a promise; while the decision produces a prediction, a promise produces a hope. The decision has contemplated all information, and the promise knows that the future is uncertain. Therefore, the promissory economy is not primarily concerned with solidifying a decision; it is more concerned with the extra investments and adjustments that continually have to be developed. The contribution of the paper is to show that to promise is to change commitments when the situation requires this. Therefore promises require forgetfulness and forgiveness: forgetfulness because learning is possible and forgiveness because others are impacted. The role of accounting under this condition is to enable promising. The study of decision making and promises moves from causality to effectuation and from solutions to generation of alternatives.

Skill and Luck in Private Equity Performance

Abstract: A striking feature of private equity (PE) is that performance is persistent, with many PE firms consistently producing high (or low) returns net of fees. We use a new variance decomposition model to isolate three components of performance persistence. We find a large amount of long-term persistence: the spread in expected net-of-fees future returns between top- and bottom-quartile PE firms is 7 to 8 percentage points annually. This spread is after controlling for substantial spurious persistence, which arises mechanically from the overlap of contemporaneous funds. Performance is noisy, however, and we find little investable persistence, meaning that it is difficult for investors in PE funds to identify top-quartile funds with top-quartile expected future performance.

Value relevance of voluntary disclosure in the annual report

Abstract: This paper examines whether the level of voluntary disclosure affects the association between current returns and future earnings. Economic theory suggests that firms might find it advantageous to provide additional pieces of information (i.e. voluntary disclosure) to investors and analysts. Our results indicate that more voluntary disclosure does not improve the association between current returns and future earnings (i.e. current returns do not reflect more future earnings news). This finding raises the question of whether voluntary information in the annual report contains value-relevant information about future earnings or if investors are simply not capable of incorporating voluntary information in the firm value estimates.