As agências de ratings definem os ratings como sendo uma opinião sobre o risco relativo, baseado na capacidade do emissor de pagar, totalmente, no prazo acordado (principal mais juros) comparando-os com os outros devedores do mercado. O risco de o emissor, da dívida, pagar o valor combinado, é importante tanto para os investidores, como garantia de que o pagamento do título será feito no prazo e valor contratados, quanto para as empresas emissoras, garantindo que cumprirão o compromisso e que conseguirão negociar bem esses títulos no mercado. A relação ratings e variáveis contábil-financeiras já vem sendo tratada na literatura, há algum tempo, sendo que um importante estudo realizado por Jay & Shank (1997) relacionou os ratings com o fluxo de caixa em empresas industriais americanas, através da média de cinco medidas de fluxo de caixa pertencentes a distintos grupos de ratings. Nos resultados desse estudo, nada foi encontrado, não podendo afirmar, assim, a existência de clara diferença nas médias de fluxos de caixa das empresas, nos diferentes grupos de ratings. Com isso, apareceu a oportunidade abordada por este estudo, de se replicar esse estudo de Jay & Shank (1997), nas empresas brasileiras, industriais e comerciais, classificadas pelas agências de rating, mais especificamente, no ano de 2006. Procurou-se então estudar a existência, ou não, da relação entre fluxo de caixa e ratings, ou seja, verificar se havia, realmente, diferença nas médias das nove medidas de fluxos de caixa (as cinco utilizadas por Jay & Shank, 1997, mais quatro elaboradas por este estudo) para cada grupo de ratings diferente. As médias, os desvios padrão e os índices desvio padrão pela média foram calculados, a fim de verificar, descritivamente, o comportamento, ao longo dos anos, das empresas classificadas nos diferentes grupos de ratings, comparando-os entre si. Pôde-se perceber, com a análise das médias, no decorrer dos anos, que a medida de fluxo de caixa que se expressou mais significativamente, mostrando, claramente a relação dos grupos de ratings, foi a medida de fluxo de caixa seis (lucro operacional somado ao valor da depreciação). Essa conseguiu mostrar, visivelmente, a relação de todos os grupos de classificação de ratings, do maior para o menor, em todos os anos. Além da análise descritiva, foi feita também uma análise estatística. Para tanto, foi possível aplicar o teste não paramétrico U de Mann-Whitney, já que somente os grupos High Grade e Medium Grade puderam ser comparados estatisticamente. Os resultados obtidos mostraram que nenhuma medida de fluxo de caixa, em todos os anos analisados, com nível de 5% de significância, rejeita a hipótese nula de que as médias dos dois grupos são iguais. Porém, as medidas de fluxo de caixa, um (lucro líquido somado à depreciação e ao imposto de renda diferido) e sete (lucro operacional somado à depreciação e à mudança líquida entre os ativos e passivos circulantes), são as mais eficientes em rejeitar a hipótese nula, por apresentarem significância estatística em quatro dos seis anos analisados em cada uma. / The rating agencies describe rating as an opinion about the relative risk founded on the issuer?s capacity of payment of its financial obligation plus an interest rate at a stated period, in comparison with other issuers. In such case, the risk of the issuer pay its debt is as much important to the investors, to guarantee that the right amount will be paid at the agreed time, as to the issuers itself, to assure that they will accomplish their debt obligation and will be able to trade it on a secondary market. The relation between rating and financial variables has been studied on literature such as the important analysis made by Jay & Shank (1997), which connects rating with American manufacturing companies? cash flows through the average between five cash flows from different groups of rating. Nevertheless, the results of this analyze can?t prove a clear difference among the cash flow?s averages in the different groups of rating. In this manner, showed up an opportunity, which is the purpose of this thesis, of replying Jay & Shank (1997) studies onto Brazilian manufacturing companies evaluated by rating agencies in 2006. This thesis aimed at studying the relation between the cash flows and the companies? rating, which means verify if there is an expressive difference among the averages of the nine standard measurements of cash flows (five presented by Jay & Shank (1997) and four more suggested by this thesis) for each distinct group of ratings. The averages, the pattern deviations and the index of the pattern deviations divided by the averages, were calculated in order to verify descriptively the behavior of those companies classified onto different rating groups along the time, comparing them between themselves. So analyzing the averages along the time, it was possible to notice that the cash flow which was more significant showing the relation between the rating groups clearly, was the cash flow number six (operating income plus depreciation), which presented the relation between all the rating groups over the years. Besides the descriptive analysis, a statistic analysis was made. In this manner, it was possible to put into practice the non-parametrical Mann-Whitney U test, once only the High Grade and Medium Grade groups could be statistically compared. The results indicated that none of cash flows, all over the years, at 5% level of significance, rejects the null hypothesis which states that both groups are equal. However, the cash flow number one (net income from operating plus depreciation and deferred taxes) and seven (operating income plus depreciation and change in current assets and liabilities) are the most efficient in rejecting the null hypothesis, as they presented statistical significance in four of the six years considered in each one.

My study investigates whether the effects of non-cash incentives on employee performance depend on when the incentive is paid and what type of task is being performed. Although firms frequently use non-cash incentives, such as merchandise, travel awards and gift cards, the effects of non-cash incentives, relative to cash incentives, are not well understood by researchers. Drawing on economic and psychology theories, I predict that the effects of incentive type (cash or non-cash) on performance depend on incentive payoff timing (near or distant future) and task type (analytic or creative). Specifically, for an analytic task, I predict and find that a cash incentive paid in the near future is most effective. For a creative task, I predict and find that a cash incentive paid in the near future and a non-cash incentive paid in the distant future are most effective. The results of my study should benefit theory and practice by identifying the most effective combination of incentive type and payoff timing for a given task type.

none

The main purpose of this research is to discuss the risk of TFT-LCD industry, and to prove that the future of this industry is not positive as expectation. Through discussing the TFT-LCD firms¡¦ operating, investing, and financing activities and observing the cash flows of their parent companies, the research tries to find the potential risk of this industry. The following conclusions were obtained. 1. From ¡§the variability of stock prices¡¨ and ¡§beta¡¨ of domestic TFT-LCD firms, we cannot find out if the operating risk of TFT-LCD industry rises or not. 2. The gap between cash flows from investing activities and cash flows from operating activities is getting larger. On the one hand, TFT-LCD firms have to keep on investing to compete with others, which makes their cash outflows grow up rapidly. On the other hand, Korean TFT-LCD firms and international system enterprises try hard to cut down panel prices, which makes domestic TFT-LCD firms can only earn low profit and even get loss. 3. Nowadays people put emphasis on the growth opportunity of LCD TV and expect the demand of LCD TV will bring TFT-LCD firms high profits. However, the research finds that the investment and production of LCD TV lack efficiency, which implies even if the demand of LCD TV spring up in the future, it won¡¦t necessarily benefit domestic TFT-LCD firms. 4. Observing the trend of Economic Value Added(EVA) of domestic TFT-LCD firms, we can see that EVA is getting lower during each valley of Crystal Cycle, which reflects the over production is getting worse in this industry and large investment accelerates the loss of TFT-LCD firms. 5. The difficulties of financing activities of domestic TFT-LCD firms include: (1) acceleration of Crystal Cycle, (2) shortage of cash flows limits the financing ability, (3) information asymmetry lowers the willingness of investors to invest, (4) banks starting to tighten the loans to TFT-LCD firms due to risk consideration. 6. The parent companies of TFT-LCD firms invest in TFT-LCD industry in order to cut down the cost and keep earning profits, however, the huge cash outflows raise the risk of the parent companies instead. It indirectly proves the high investment risk of TFT-LCD industry.

Regulators only require banks to manage their short-term exchange rate risk stringently. A possible reason is that the prevailing capital-market methodology cannot determine the long-term exchange rate risk. Using the real performance of operating incomes, this paper investigates the impact of fluctuating foreign currencies on the values of Taiwanese banking institutions, and decomposes the overall exchange rate risk into short-term and long-term components. We not only overcome the deficiency of prior studies that have limited success in detecting significant currency exposure, but also measure correct economic exposure that firms are confronted with. Comparing with the capital market approach, we find the evidence of the relative strength of cash flows to detect currency exposure. After controlling for the impact of interest rates, we find that, over the time period examined, 61.54% of the sample firms have a significant currency exposure, which is larger than those documented by prior research. Our result also shows that the existence of significant long-term exchange rate risk is prevalent among Taiwanese banking institutions. Furthermore, US dollar (the currency of a nation which is Taiwan¡¦s largest exporting country) has an opposite effect as opposed to Japanese Yen (the currency of a nation which is Taiwan¡¦s largest importing partner). Our results have policy implications that banking institutions should manage long-term currency exposure.

TV commercials play an important role for consumers¡¦ purchasing behavior. As the competition being fierce in the financial goods market, the banks weight the commercial effect with the sales of issued cards. What kind of commercials elicit the most effective advertising result? A successful commercial precisely transmits the message to the target consumers, and it must be logical and convincing for consumers¡¦ demand. What kind of TV commercials will attract the desire of purchasing? This study is based on content analysis approach to analyze 49 TV commercials about cash cards in Taiwan, intends to probe the commercial types for the corporations to meet the consumers¡¦ need efficiently. After statistical analysis, find it as follows mainly: 1. Cash card commercials are mostly drama-oriented expression, and the main purpose is for promotion or service. The ¡¥static¡¦ type is vocal and narrative. 2. Commercial contexts are physical surroundings indoors and outdoors, designed for the interpersonal interaction of more than three people, with voice-over to communicate, and provide abundant information. 3. Commercials show the most powerful influence on symbolic needs, which are the needs for social relationship and the sense of self-achievement. 4. Commercials shape the cash cards as perceptual and low-involvement goods.

The study focus on how customer satisfaction influence capital structure . Among lots of the theory of capital structure , if we reconsider the customer satisfaction ,we would explain the theory of capital structure deeply . We select the customer satisfaction index as our observable variable . In brief , our study have two main purposes ¡G 1.Does customer satisfaction influence capital structure ? 2.If customer satisfaction influence capital structure by cash f low , how would it influence capital structure . This paper employs a database containing the market and accounting data (from 1996 to 2005) from more than 40 NYSE-listed companies(212 samples) to document our empirical study . We find that customer satisfaction has significant impact on capital structure by cash flow and the capital structure is nearly the same as the pecking order theory ¡Awhich suggest that firms are said to prefer retained earnings as their main source of funds for investment .

With the fast development in industry and commerce in Taiwan in recent years, a great deal of waste is called into being. Because the waste yards in every region reach saturation sequentially, it has become the domestic trend to build recycling plants in order to properly cope with the garbage problems. However, the conventional way the government puts up capital to build public works has to be confronted with adjustment owe of the governmental functions and the limits in finance. Therefore, privatizing the public works to introduce the non-governmental flexible operating methods and getting abundant capital to speed up the establishment of recycling plants and efficient operating goals have become the new critical points of public works in governmental environmental protection. The establishment of recycling plants takes a large number of funds and long period, during which there are many variables and high risk, and the main consideration of BOT invested by private enterprises is the rate of return on investment, so private enterprises have to study and analyze very carefully and map out the investment policies about how to carry out an investment evaluation and how to minimize or circumvent all kinds of risks in the executive process. Aimed at BOT¡¦s special properties of recycling plants, this research adopts the cash flow analysis and probes into the financial projects and risk control to provide the reference materials to factory owners who are interested in BOT and also the consideration of amending the BOT-related provisions to the relevant departments in government.

Abstract This thesis is composed of three models that imply the impact of managers¡¦ characteristics on investment under asymmetric information. The first one regards insider as managers and formulates a model to explain the positive relationship between cash flow and capital expenditure of a firm, and tries to synthesize the ¡§asymmetric information hypothesis¡¨(Myers and Majluf, 1984) and the ¡§free cash flow hypothesis¡¨(Jensen, 1986) by insider ownership. The finding demonstrates that in instances with low percentage of insider ownership, the free cash flow hypothesis will better explain the positive relationship between cash flow and capital expenditure and will have the phenomenon of over-investment. On the other hand, when the percentage of insider ownership is high, the asymmetric information hypothesis is better suited to explain this relationship and will have the phenomenon of the under-investment. The second one formulates a model to synthesize the ¡§reputation effect¡¨ and ¡§asymmetric information hypothesis¡¨ through considering the outsider investors¡¦ evaluation of the firms in terms of firms¡¦ reputation and firms¡¦ private information. This study concludes that the good type firms with low reputation will show the behavior of under-investment and the bad type firms with high reputation will have the phenomenon of over-investment. Moreover, the model demonstrates that both the phenomena of under-investment and of over-investment are caused by the conflict between the firms and the outsider investors. At last, this study implies that the effect of reputation has an influence on the choice of financial tools for the good type firms but does not have an influence on that of the bad ones. This study presents a general model to explain two types of investment inefficiency under the effect of reputation in a reasonable mode. The last one formulates a model to synthesize the ¡§bias effect¡¨ and ¡§reputation effect¡¨ through considering the fact that the CEO in the interest of firm is in favor of a certain project and that junior managers concern their reputation. This study concludes that the CEO¡¦s bias will influence the project that the managers suggest and does not necessarily lead to the direction of bias. The untalented managers will be affected more seriously than talented managers. Moreover, the model combines ¡§bias effect¡¨ with ¡§asymmetric information hypothesis¡¨ and implies that the bias can alleviate the problem of under-investment under certain circumstances. This finding shows that the bias is not always a negative factor of investment efficiency.

The cash dividend payout ratio in Taiwan had declined slowly in past years, but it suddenly became higher and higher since 1998. The phenomenon gave me the motivation to try to find the reason why the trend of cash dividend payout ratio changed the direction. I first test the relationship between the characters of firms and their cash dividend payout ratios. The results declared that the market-to-book ratio, earning ability and firm size significantly influences the cash dividend payout ratio. Then I tried to test the catering theory to recognize if the change of cash dividend payout ratio trend can attribute to managers¡¦ desire to cater the demand of investors and found catering theory seems capable in explaining the phenomenon. But Hoberg and Prabhala (2007) indicated that if we take the risks into account, the catering theory can not sufficiently explain the change of the trend of cash dividend payout ratio. So I took Tax Integration and the risks which calculated by the methods of Fama and French (2003) into account to prove their perspectives. At last, the results revealed that the influence of catering were not very strong if we consider the risks of firms, but the influence of risks and Tax Integration has significantly great influences.