I'm an Associate Professor of Accounting at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway.
My main research interest focuses on accounting and corporate finance, with a particular recent interest in the relation between financial reporting and corporate financing decisions. I have published in leading journals such as the Journal of Accounting Research or the Review of Finance and also serve as an associate editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance.
I currently teach courses on Financial Reporting and Analysis (bachelor), Financial Accounting Theory (master) and guest lectures on Pension Accounting under IAS 19 (master).
We contribute to the literature on “market timing” by exploring periods of simultaneous equity issues and debt retirements (a leverage decreasing recapitalization, LDR). Contrary to traditional equity issues, LDRs are predicted by measures of creditor control whereas capital investment has no such predictive power. Nevertheless, LDRs occur after stock price run- ups and in periods of high valuation which subsequently decrease. The valuation dynamics are robust and also obtain for subsamples of LDR firms violating financial covenants. A comparison to debt retirements financed by illiquid asset sales and an analysis of discretionary cost items further corroborates the interpretation that LDR firms successfully “time the market” to finance the debt retirement.
We test whether high-frequency net-debt issuers (HFIs)—public industrial companies with relatively low issuance costs and high debt-financing benefits—manage leverage toward long-run targets. Our answer is they do not: (1) the leverage–profitability correlation is negative even in quarters with leverage rebalancing; (2) the speed-of-adjustment to target leverage deviations is no higher for HFIs than for low-frequency net-debt issuers; and (3) under-leveraged HFIs do not speed up rebalancing activity in significant investment periods. Thus, even in the subset of firms most likely to follow dynamic trade-off theory, the theory does not appear to hold.
Kisser, Michael; Kiff, John & Soto, Mauricio (2017)
Do managers of U.S. defined benefit pension plan sponsors use regulatory freedom strategically?