Mattias Hamberg’s research while affiliated with University of Stavanger and other places

We study how executive compensation disclosure (ECD) is affected by the economic incentives of owners and managers in a Swedish setting where agency conflicts are not so much between managers and owners, but between controlling and non-controlling owners. In our sample, control is often enhanced through mechanisms such as dual share classes. The analysis relies on detailed hand-collected ECD data from 2,837 annual reports. As expected, disclosure decreases with ownership concentration and the owner’s excess voting rights. In Sweden, overpaid Chief Executive Offices (CEOs) improve ECD quality, but this is not the case when the controlling owner has excess control rights. This suggests that when managers have a bond with controlling owners, ECD is part of the agency problem between controlling and non-controlling owners, and executive compensation plays a different role than in previously studied Anglo-Saxon settings.

We investigate how different motives shape the initial accounting for goodwill in a setting dominated by controlling owners, using data from 1112 acquisition analyses reported by Swedish listed acquiring firms. In contrast to prior studies, we find no evidence that earnings-based compensation affects the proportion of the purchased price accounted for as goodwill. Instead, we find that when a family-owned firm is the acquirer, a larger proportion of the purchase price is accounted for as goodwill than as specific assets and liabilities. These two findings indicate that controlling owners may curb managerial motives, while controlling family owners apply the discretion of IFRS 3 according to their motives. We also find in this setting that acquisition-related motives have a significant impact on the proportion of the purchased price accounted for as goodwill. Overall, our analyses indicate that the motives shaping goodwill accounting choices depend on the institutional setting.

Purpose Accentuating the concept of management under uncertainty in the Uppsala internationalization process model, the purpose of this paper is to develop a model for describing how managers act while keeping uncertainty at an acceptable level. Design/methodology/approach The authors perform two empirical studies to underpin the model they construct. First, a survey of 309 chief executive officers and chief financial officers in large, publicly listed international firms in the Nordic region on managerial risk perceptions and, second, a case study of Volvo Car Corporation and its endeavors when developing new car models for the Chinese market on a new platform – a process characterized by unprecedented uncertainty. Findings The proposed model describing managers’ behavior under uncertainty contains elements such as adjusting/proceeding in small steps, reducing uncertainty via learning, building relationships with important parties in the environment to avoid unforeseen changes and re-dos (i.e. starting all over again) and, perhaps most important, acting despite uncertainty. Originality/value The paper highlights a central, though forgotten, concept of the Uppsala internationalization process model, i.e. management under uncertainty, and, thereby, opens a new path for research on how manager behave under the sway of uncertainty.

This study examines the value relevance effects of changes in goodwill accounting in a European setting. International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 3 replaced accounting rules that emphasized goodwill amortization over short useful lives which kept goodwill balances low. Goodwill accounting under IFRS 3 largely relies on manager fair value estimates of acquired business units. Using Swedish data, we show that goodwill amortizations were not value-relevant prior to the adoption of IFRS 3. However, impairments reported in addition to amortization were significantly related to stock returns during that period. In contrast, under the impairment-only regime prescribed by IFRS 3, impairments are no longer statistically related to stock returns. Classification: M41 Accounting

Research shows that the bid announcement return (BAR) of the acquiring firm is lower for cross-border than domestic acquisition announcements. The current lack of economically based explanations for this effect, labeled the cross-border effect by Moeller and Schlingemann (2005), motivates our study. We use unique hand-collected corporate governance data to study how the relationships between acquiring and target firms prior to a bid announcement affect the cross-border effect. Our tests show that non-operating associations between the acquiring and target firms, in the form of board participation and toeholds, have a positive effect on the BAR. The cross-border effect disappears when we control for board participation and toeholds. Thus, we suggest that the cross-border effect is at least partly a consequence of information asymmetries and the adverse selection problem that they generate.

We examine the familiarity hypothesis of home bias by studying how foreign ownership of Swedish firms is affected by the mandatory adoption of IFRS. We decompose foreign investors into institutional and non-institutional investors. Foreign investors are further decomposed into EU (IFRS adopting countries) and non-EU residents (non-IFRS adopting countries). We analyse the equity investments of these foreign investor groups in Sweden during the period of 2001-2007. We find that after the mandatory adoption of IFRS, foreign ownership/owners from countries that adopted IFRS and particularly those from the EU increased. These effects are particularly strong in small firms. Foreign institutional investors increased their ownership stake after the mandatory IFRS adoption, whereas foreign non-institutional investments were not affected significantly by the IFRS adoption. In contrast to ownership from non-adopting countries, ownership from the EU increased in firms with both more and less tangible assets. Similarly, foreign ownership from the EU increased in firms with both concentrated ownership and dispersed ownership after the adoption. Because Sweden has already had strict legal enforcement and a low level of earnings management prior to the adoption, our results suggest that increased foreign ownership is due to better abilities to compare firms rather than an improved quality.

This study demonstrates that the value relevance of accounting information is influenced by the ability to capitalize investments in valuable resources. We use data from Sweden to show that firms that operate in industries in which accounting conservatism limits this capitalization display lower value relevance as a result of more unsustainable earnings components. However, when controlling for the different properties of sustainable and unsustainable earnings components, the difference vanishes. Moreover, we show that firms operating in industries in which more investments are immediately expensed display systematic temporal variations in the level of value relevance. We contend that economic conditions in the form of investment levels and growth expectations explain this variation. Thus, value relevance can be substantially affected by the prevailing economic context.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which founding‐family firms create value. In particular, the paper investigates how agency costs and monitoring capabilities influence the value creation process. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis relies on unique hand‐collected ownership data that has been collected for all Swedish publicly listed firms in the years 2001 to 2010 (2,128 observations). The research design employs level regression specifications and they are tested using pooled cross‐sectional regressions with controls for year and industry fixed effects. Findings The paper confirms previous studies that firms with founding family ownership have a higher value (Tobin's Q) and higher performance (RNOA). In contrast to prior studies, the paper finds that firm value and performance is significantly higher when ownership is concentrated the most. The paper also shows that firm value and performance is significantly lower for long‐term non‐founding‐family ownership. Originality/value This is one of the largest single‐country analyses of founding family owner effects on value and performance in publicly listed firms. The paper confirms known associations between ownership and performance in a unique institutional setting. The paper extends previous research findings by identifying differences in value and performance between founding family owners and long‐term non‐founding‐family owners.

The value premium earned on value and growth investment strategies increases after adjusting for transitory earnings and for the accounting conservatism bias in the book value of equity. Simple investment strategies based on earnings-to-price (E/P) and book-to-market (B/M) performed on the Swedish stock market between 1980 and 2004 generate an annual value premium of 11 to 14%. Adjustments for transitory earnings and for the conservatism bias increase the value premium by 2 to 4 percentage points, and at the same time they improve the consistency of earning it. These results suggest that transitory earnings and accounting conservatism introduce noise into E/P and B/M measures. Adjusting for these accounting characteristics makes the identification based on E/P and B/M more effective. Copyright (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

In recent years, several accounting standards, including IFRS 3, issued by the IASB, substitute historical cost with fair value measures and so provide managers with increased discretion to determine fair value without an actual market for the asset. Using Swedish data, we document the accounting consequences of the adoption of IFRS 3 and the stock market's reaction. After the adoption of this standard in January 2005 the amount of capitalized goodwill increased substantially. Goodwill impairments under IFRS are considerably lower than goodwill amortizations and impairments made under Swedish GAAP. Consequently, the adoption of IFRS 3 increased reported earnings. An analysis of economic incentives influencing the impairment decision at the initial adoption of IFRS 3 shows that tenured management is negatively associated with the impairment decision. However, most firms did not reclassify goodwill or make additional impairments. Firms with substantial amounts of goodwill yielded abnormally high returns despite abnormally low earnings. Investors seem to, correctly or incorrectly, have viewed the accrual-based increase in earnings stemming from IFRS 3 as an indication of higher future cash flows.