The aim of the paper is to verify, through the measurement of value creation, the existence of a competitive advantage in those companies recognized as “Dividend Champions” in the S&P 500. The paper uses a quantitative and explorative method of research and is divided into two sections: in the first, it identifies, within the S&P 500, those companies that have systematically, for more than 40 years, distributed dividends that have grown each year (60 firms), and in the second, it gives a comparative analysis of the Return on Invested Capital and Weighted Average Cost of Capital of the analysed firms, in order to investigate the existence of a competitive advantage. The results of our research show that the “Dividend Champions” have, in comparison to their main competitors of reference in the US market, a lasting competitive advantage, in virtue of a higher profitability with respect to the cost of capital. Specifically, we can observe that the “Dividend Champions”, classified by sector, are also “Value Champions”, able to beat competitors and having a lasting competitive advantage
Start-ups are new businesses, which need a good amount of equity to finance investments. Crowdfunding is an alternative instrument to collect money. It does not need the intervention of a bank, but allows to obtain the funds directly from the public by network platforms.
This article focuses on the possibility for a start-up to raise capital through crowdfunding. The argument is quite known on an international level, even if scholars often focus on specific problems or on particular moments of the life cycle of the start-up. On the contrary, the two arguments are really new in Italy. The Italian crowdfunding market is young – the main increase in the platforms number (+63%) is between 2013 and 2014 - and the national regulation which allows to finance start-ups by crowdfunding is even more recent (latest legal document in 2017).
The novelty of the topic explains the added value of this article. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study focused on the Italian start-ups financed by crowdfunding. We analyze the phenomenon from the birth of the different platforms (2005 for the first one) since the end of the first semester 2018.
At the time of the subprime crisis, investors strongly blamed credit rating agencies (CRAs). Six years later, we want to verify if CRAs are still suffering a reputational damage by measuring stock prices reactions to rating announcements. To test our hypothesis we conduct an event analysis on the American, EU area and Asian/Pacific stock markets over a ten-year period from November 2003 to November 2013. We find that the postcrisis abnormal returns are in general lower if compared with the pre-crisis level, in particular if rating changes are far away from the speculative-junk border.
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