Impaired Asset Management and the Optimal Timing of Write-Down Decisions

Abstract

Asset write-down refers to a reduction of an impaired asset’s value on a firm’s balance sheet. Impaired asset management has attracted much attention since the 2008 credit crunch crisis with respect to regulation, corporate and managerial ethics, capital market response and more. The common approach in past studies of write-downs based the decision-making process on agency-related reasoning. This paper presents a quantitative financial analysis of the optimal write-down timing of an impaired asset under different settings as well different managerial attitudes. We applied a conditional time-averaged value of a firm’s stock price to model the manager’s decision-making process and analyzed the optimal timing of write-down with respect to the capital market as well as management’s expectations. Different exogenous settings of the optimal write-down timing such as impairment recovery rate and stock price return were analyzed. Moreover, a rational-type and behavioral type models of managers were also studied. Under most settings, our findings indicate that the common practice among managers, of write-down aversion, is optimal. However, counterintuitively, we found that under specific setting the optimal action is, on the contrary, to write down. Moreover, write-down decision is also dependent on the firm’s stock price daily volatility. Managers of firms having stocks of high price volatility are in a favored position, decision-making wise, in comparison against manager of low volatility stocks.