Category: Finance

Podcast: What information is used to determine stock price?

A company’s financial statements play a critical part in how its share prices fare in the markets. But financial statements aren’t the only sources of information markets use to determine the valuation of a company. Professor Herbert Kaufman, vice chair of the finance department at the W. P. Carey School of Business, teaches a class on the essentials of finance and accounting for the W. P. Carey School’s Center for Executive and Professional Development. Here, Kaufman explains the kinds of information markets use, and how they use that information, to determine the value of a company’s stock.

Shouldering triple responsibilities: Social responsibility in Chinese banking

Social responsibility is not just about handing out money, or establishing a charity or a fund, said Huaqing Wang, assistant chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission and director-general of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), Shanghai office. In his keynote address to the Fourth Annual Executive Forum, hosted by the W. P. Carey School of Business and the Shanghai National Accounting Institute, Wang argued that banks must take a broader definition of "service."

Podcast: Financial statements tell compelling stories about companies

Managers, markets, and the many players who must contract with a firm: all three groups need credible information about companies. The financial statement — which includes the income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows — tells a compelling story when read as a whole. Phil Drake, clinical professor of accountancy at the W. P. Carey School, talks about the information contained in the financial statement and who needs to know it.

Christopher Cole: Emerging trends in real estate investment

"In real estate, if you keep yourself in front of long-term demographic trends, you will prosper," observes Christopher Cole, founder and chief executive of the Cole Companies, who received the Distinguished Achievement Award at the W. P. Carey undergraduate convocation recently. A survivor of Phoenix’s boom-and-bust real estate markets for more than 28 years, Cole maintains real estate as an investment class is in its baby years. The biggest inflows of capital, he says, have yet to happen.

Where are the shareholders’ mansions? CEOs’ home purchases, stock sales and subsequent company performance management

While U.S. corporate CEOs acquire enormous estates, shareholders are being left out in the cold. In a new study, W. P. Carey finance professor Crocker Liu, director of the school’s Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice, and David Yermack, professor of finance at New York University, examined the size, cost, and financing of the primary residences of CEOs of the Standard & Poor’s 500. They found that when CEOs purchase very expensive or particularly large estates, their companies’ stock performance falters.

Reports of the Phoenix real estate market’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

Phoenix, now the fifth largest city in the United States, could be the poster child for metropolitan areas where a bursting residential housing bubble has created economic discord. After parsing data from both the commercial and residential sectors, however, the Phoenix real estate market appears much stronger than the national press paints it, according to Larry Seay, chief financial officer of Phoenix-based Meritage Corp., and Crocker Liu, McCord Chair in Real Estate at the W. P. Carey School of Business. Seay and Liu spoke at an April 5 seminar in Phoenix entitled "Frontiers in Real Estate: Hedging Your Bets," presented by the W. P. Carey School’s Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice.