Browsing by Author "Smith, Colin"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Open Access
    Impact of intellectual capital on firm performance: Evidence from South African JSE listed firms
    (2020) Maluleke, Makungu Juanita; Smith, Colin
    The new knowledge economy has created a global interest on the valuation of intellectual capital as well as its impact on firm performance and value. Developing economies have relatively only begun to investigate this relationship and progress has already been made in South Africa by a few researchers. The purpose of this study is to add to this investigation by exploring the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance for South African listed firms in intellectual capital-intensive industries. A gap exists in South African research regarding the long-term impact of intellectual capital on firm performance. This relationship is important to define as firms may well make inappropriate decisions based on short-term relationships that do not create long-term value. This study applies a lag model in an aim to investigate this relationship in addition to the short-term relationship that exists between intellectual capital and firm performance. The study involves a quantitative analysis of data collected from firms in intellectual capital-intensive industries and makes use of the VAIC model developed by Ante Pulic to value intellectual capital. Measures of firm performance used are return on assets, total asset turnover and market capitalization. This study also makes use of panel data covering 62 JSE listed companies over 10 years. Empirical results show mixed outcomes regarding the relationship between intellectual capital and firm performance for both short-term models and lagged models. In some instances, no association was observed between intellectual capital and performance.
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    Ownership Structure and Board Characteristics as Determinants of CEO Turnover in South African JSE Listed Companies
    (2021) Mofokeng, Rethabile Thandolwethu; Smith, Colin
    The CEO of a large listed firm is often under public scrutiny due to listing requirements of stock exchanges of the respective country as well as pressures from stakeholders. Of these stakeholders, shareholders are mostly interested in the firm performance as it relates to their investment to determine if their investment is still worthwhile as well as to determine its returns. A CEO has the duty of ensuring that a firm meets its set targets and the responsibility of having to account for any deviations from these targets. In a firm with sound corporate governance measures, any underperformance experienced by the firm should result in the CEO being replaced and when targets met, the CEO being rewarded. However this is not always the case and this study considers the key determinants of CEO turnover as it later aims to determine what these key determinants are in South African JSE-listed firms as well as the correlation with CEO turnover. This study examines the relationship between ownership structure and board characteristics on CEO-firm performance sensitivity. The population for this study was 60 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The period covered for this study runs over 5 years from 2013 to 2017. This period was chosen mainly because data for some companies was missing for the period beyond 2017. Thus, excluding companies that had no data for the period beyond 2017 could have reduced the sample further and would have made the analysis less meaningful. The study reports three important findings. The first is that CEO turnover is insensitive to firm performance, irrespective of whether it is an accounting-based firm performance (i.e CEO turnover vs EBIT/Assets ratio) or market-based measure of firm performance (lagged stock returns, 18, 24, and 36 months respectively). Second, the findings of this study show that CEO age and institutional ownership are inversely related to CEO turnover. In addition, board size becomes a significant determinant of CEO turnover when the model in includes returns lagged over 36 months or when the EBIT/Assets ratio is part of the Model (see models 7 and 8), although this is only at 10% level of significance. Third, board insiders and firm size are found to be unrelated to CEO turnover.
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    Stock price reactions to dividend changes : evidence from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange
    (2006) Mu, Lin; Smith, Colin
    This research paper examines stock price reactions to the changes in cash dividend payments for mature companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Prior South African research studies have employed the Market Model and Mean-Adjusted Return Model of event study to estimate "normal return" of the companies listed on the JSE. This study has employed the Market-Adjusted Return Model and short event window (-5, +5) to test the effect of dividend changes. The empirical results are based on 48 samples of mature companies with regular half yearly cash dividend records during the 2000- 2004 period. Using 4741 dividend change observations, it was found that the stock price reactions to increase announcements were greater than those for decrease announcements over the entire event days. It was further found that the stronger positive market reactions were associated with those announcements of larger percentage increases in dividends. These results lead to support the existence of the Dividend Signalling Hypothesis.
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    The value relevance of accounting earnings and book values to share price on the industrial sector of the JSE securities exchange
    (2004) Weldegabir, Habtom Ghebremeskel; Smith, Colin
    This paper investigates the value relevance of accounting earnings and book value of equity to share price on the Johannesburg Security Exchange (JSE) market. The research was motivated by the results of different researchers on different markets which reveal that the value relevance of accounting earnings and book value has increased on emerging capital markets while it as decreased on developed capital markets.