Browsing by Author "Du, Ruixue"

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    Intangible Assets Valuation in the Hospitality Industry
    Du, Ruixue (Virginia Tech, 2013-04-25)
    Market value of firms and book value of firms are rarely the same. The difference, which is attributed to unrecorded or unrecognized intangible assets, has increased significantly since the 1970s. The issue of appropriately valuing these intangible assets, however, still remains unresolved. The purpose of this study is to address this lack of understanding of valuing intangible assets in the hospitality industry. Five intangible asset investments: Research and Development, Training, Advertising, Labor, Pension, and one business model, Franchising, are chosen as the valuation constructs in this study based on previous research in the hospitality industry. The valuation models for the casual dining restaurant industry and the quick service restaurant industry are compared. The sample of this study includes 13 casual dining restaurant firms and 12 quick service restaurant firms. Compustat North America is the primary data source for this study. The annual data for casual dining restaurant firms from 1980 to 2011 is collected from this database. There are 238 firm-years in total. Two firm-years are excluded due to systematic missing values, and 15 firm-years are excluded due to missing share price information. Thus, the final count of data points for casual dining restaurant firms usable for analysis purposes is 221. The annual data for quick service restaurant firms from 1980 to 2011 is also collected from the Compustat North America database. There are 251 firm-years in total. Eight firm-years are excluded due to systematic missing values, and 47 firm-years are excluded due to missing share price information. Thus, the final count of data points for quick service restaurant firms usable for analysis purposes is 196. Pearson correlation and multivariate analyses are performed to answer the four research questions in this study. Two hypotheses are supported while one hypothesis is not supported and one hypothesis remains unanswered due to Multicollinearity issues identified in multiple regression models. The results of this study show that 1) R&D, training, advertising, labor and pension are all important valuation constructs in the hospitality industry, and 2) there are some differences, however, between casual dining restaurant firms and quick service restaurant firms. This study fills the gap in the current literature by providing a quantitative method to value intangible assets in the hospitality industry that uses the valuation constructs identified in previous hospitality research. The practical implications of this study will provide managers in the hospitality industry with helpful insights for strategic decision making, specifically in regards to research and development, advertising and employee compensation.
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    The Relationship Between Share Price and Operating Cash Flow Under the Casual Theme Restaurant Setting
    Du, Ruixue (Virginia Tech, 2008-05-09)
    In spite of the well-accepted belief of the relationship between cash flow and stock price, there are some controversies about whether cash flow is a good value driver in terms of explaining the volatility of stock prices, when compared with other value drivers, such as earnings or dividends. Most of the previous studies that have focused on the relationship between stock price and cash flow have used cross-industries data, primarily S&P 500 index. These studies do not distinguish service industry from manufacturing industry. However, the service industry is different from manufacturing in many ways. These differences make cash play different roles in the daily operation between the service industry and the manufacturing industry. Given these factors, whether the relationship between stock price and cash flow identified in previous studies will hold in the casual theme restaurant industry is the question this study tries to answer. Therefore, a set of 20 casual theme restaurant companies are selected through the COMPUSTAT database as the sample of this study. In this study, the performance of cash flow, earnings and dividends helping to explain the stock price move will be compared and ranked under the setting of casual theme restaurants. This result will provide the management of casual theme restaurants a guideline, which explains how to maintain the stock price increase and minimize the volatility by monitoring the most important value driver of the industry. The methodology of this study will follow the traditional multiple valuation model. The logic of this model is to compare the pricing error of different value drivers and determine which one is the best. The results of this study show that operating cash flow outperformed earnings and dividends in the multiple valuation tests. This is different from the results of previous studies that earnings has the strongest explanatory power in the variance of share price.