Sustainability reporting is a major, and contentious, topic. I wholeheartedly encourage academics to engage in topics like this — they matter. In theory, such engagement makes academic work extremely relevant. Consultants produce reports but sometimes these are over-optimistic, biased, or just plain wrong. This means academics can have an important place in improving the quality…
Category: Tobin’s q
Not All Papers Must Feature Firm Performance
Today I’m discussing another paper that uses Total Q. I won’t spend too long on that. I have said plenty elsewhere about how bad Total Q is as a measure of firm performance. In this post, I want to somewhat sympathize with the authors of a paper that uses Total Q. I will tell a…
A Total Q Mystery: Understanding Academic Marketing
I was disappointed to read Du and Osmonbekov‘s 2020 paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, see here. The authors clearly don’t mind hard work and I’m sure they have useful empirical skills. Still they aren’t young researchers making errors or rushing a paper to the market. They can do better. It is…
Adjusting For Unrecorded Intangibles Is Hard
I have previously written about the good, and not so good, parts of Alexander Edeling’s, Shuba Srinivasan’s, and Dominique M. Hanssens’ 2020 review paper on the marketing finance interface, see here. Here I will comment on a specific assertion they make that strikes me as misleading. It is important to highlight this as I fear…
Total Q Measures Investment Opportunities Not Firm Value
Papers in finance can sometimes get a hefty citation count boost when they get picked up in marketing. Peters and Taylor‘s 2017 paper on Total q is a nice paper. They make the very reasonable assertion that their Total q measures investment opportunities better than current Tobin’s q approximations. While I’m not a finance person…
What Can The Marketing-Finance Interface Tell Us About Witchcraft Trials?
Edeling, Srinivasan, and Hanssens have a useful new review paper on the Marketing-Finance Interface. The Value Of Review Papers Review papers, such as this, play a vital role in helping frame the field. They give Ph.D. students a way to get up to speed on prior contributions. Review papers also give more seasoned academics a…
Understanding What Companies Are Spending On Marketing. SG&A Isn’t Great.
I often discuss marketing assets. Specifically, I worry about that the way marketing assets are accounted for in financial reports. This does not help us understand marketing effectiveness. For example, see here and here and here. This results of financial accounting choices creat a significant problem in understanding what marketing does. It means we can’t…
What Is Tobin’s Q Useful For?
I am not a fan of Tobin’s q (as it is currently used). I have a Marketing Science paper on the misuse of Tobin’s q in marketing. As such, I was fascinated to see a SSRN working paper with a very similar title in the field of finance/economics. The authors Robert Bartlett and Frank Partnoy,…
The Right Metric Depends Upon Its Planned Use
Sometimes I worry that marketing academics have a bit of an inferiority complex. We seem to have an aversion to anything developed in marketing. Instead, we look back to psychology (if we are consumer behavior scholars). Or we look to economics (for more quantitative scholars). This means that we often see citations to other disciplines…
Proving The Value Of Marketing
Over the next couple of weeks I will consider ideas from a paper coming out in Marketing Science. [This post was written in 2018]. I wrote the paper with a former PhD student, Moeen Butt. This looks at the use of a metric called Tobin’s q. This has been used in papers claiming to be…
