Research
Empirical Economics
Performance and the business cycle. What happens to sales, costs and profits around the business cycle and what happened in the financial crisis? The performance of private equity. Chris Higson's empirical research focuses on the long-term behaviour of company fundamentals and its relationship to the macroeconomy.
Current themes are as follows:
Competitive convergence in firm profitability. Sectoral and business cycle determinants.
The stochastic processes of accounting primitives - sales, income, and balance sheet components.
Volatility in firm growth rates.
Impact of the recession on company financial behaviour.
Merger, and bankruptcy, around the business cycle.
This research has received considerable continuing research funding, most recently from the European Union Finess Programme under Framework 7 to study financial integration and competitive convergence in Europe and the US.
Practice and Regulation
The other theme in Chris's work is practice-oriented and aimed at influencing the practice of performance measurement and
regulatory policy. This work has principally been in the following areas:
Practice of financial analysis and valuation.
The measurement of social costs and benefits.
Accounting and valuation for intangible assets, in particular information, brands, and goodwill. Accounting for leases.
Tax reform.
The monograph on Valuing Information as an Asset is particularly aimed at public sector. It describes the current evolution of the finance and accounting role. It postulates a dominant position for finance in the information age due to accounting’s traditional role as the information gatekeeper; but it shows that it is necessary to apply traditional accounting disciplines to knowledge assets. This paper will soon be available to download in pdf format.
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