I'm an Associate Professor of Accounting at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo and also serve as the Associate Dean of the "Master in Accounting and Auditing" and the "PhD Specialization in Accounting". Prior to joining BI Norwegian Business School, I was Assistant and Associate Professor in Finance (with tenure) at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen.
My main research interest focuses on corporate finance and financial reporting decisions, with a particular emphasis on the interaction between the two research fields. Several papers of mine were published in journals listed on the prestigious Financial Times List, including outlets such as the Journal of Accounting Research or the Review of Finance.
My teaching experience ranges from bachelor level courses to executive programs at BI Norwegian Business School, the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and WU Executive Academy. The teaching portfolio is broad coverings topics such as Financial Accounting, Sustainability Reporting, Financial Statement Analysis, Treasury Management, Corporate Finance, International Finance, Portfolio Management and Valuation.
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?