Operational flexibility and market valuation of earnings
研究了运营灵活性不同的公司，其股票回报与会计盈余之间的关系，发现业务遍布多国但不过度集中于某一国的跨国公司，其盈余与回报的关联性显著更强。
This paper examines the association between the stock returns and accounting earnings of firms that have different levels of operational flexibility. Operational flexibility is a firm’s ability to respond profitably to environmental fluctuations by shifting factors of production within a multinational network of subsidiaries. The geographic breadth and depth of a firm’s multinational network are used as indicators of operational flexibility. We find a significantly greater coefficient relating stock returns and accounting earnings for multinational firms that operate in many countries, but limit their concentration in any one foreign country, than for other multinational firms or domestic firms. This coefficient is significantly smaller for multinational firms whose foreign subsidiaries are highly concentrated in a few countries. When all multinational firms are pooled together, we find their earnings-returns association does not differ from that of domestic firms. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.