Tobin's Q

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Tobin's Q

Market value of assets divided by replacement value of assets. A Tobin's Q ratio greater than 1 indicates the firm has done well with its investment decisions. Named after James Tobin, Yale University economist.

Tobin's Q Ratio

A ratio of a company's market value to its total asset value. Tobin's Q ratio is based on the work of James Tobin, who suggested that a fairly priced company ought to have a price equal to its total asset value. Thus, when Tobin's Q ratio is less than one, it means that the market value of the company is less than the total asset value, indicating that it is undervalued. Likewise, when it is more than one, it indicates that the market value is higher than the total asset value and that the company might be overvalued. Tobin's Q ratio is also called simply a Q ratio.

Tobin's Q

See Q ratio.

Wall Street Words: An A to Z Guide to Investment Terms for Today's Investor by David L. Scott. Copyright © 2003 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. All rights reserved.

References in periodicals archive ?

Further, the market response is especially favorable for firms with overinvestment problems as measured by Tobin's q, and is not related to signaling costs as measured by the size of the repurchase.

In studying how investors interpret the reasons for the actual share repurchases, we follow Lang and Litzenberger (1989), who use Tobin's q to identify overinvesting firms.

We use two proxies, Tobin's q and the size of share repurchases, to distinguish between the free cash flow and the information-signaling hypotheses.

Share repurchases, the clustering problem, and the free cash flow hypothesis

We consider a particular theory of investment (known to economists as Tobin's q), but the crux of the argument is that stock market prices serve as a signal to firms' managers to buy new investment goods.

The story told by Tobin's q is, perhaps, overly stylized.

Nonetheless, the basic intuition underlying Tobin's q is compelling: Changes in stock prices should serve as a signal to firms' managers.

Why policymakers might care about stock market bubbles

In addition, our source of replacement cost data is superior to that used in most studies which use Tobin's Q. The following sections of this paper discuss the data collection process and the methodology.

We conclude that, on average, the marginal and average Tobin's Q ratios differ for firms in the sample.

[4] Chirinko, Robert S., 1986, "Investment, Tobin's Q, and Multiple Capital Inputs," NBER Working Paper Series 2033 (October), 1-27.

A comparison of marginal and average Tobin's Q ratios

We use Tobin's q, the ratio of the market value of the firm to its replacement value, to measure the extent of a firm's growth options and flexibility to respond to new conditions.(6) Tobin's q increases as more of a firm's value is due to growth options, i.e., as the firm has increased flexibility in choosing its future path.

The other essential data observations needed for our hypotheses tests are the Tobin's q and market share of industry revenue data.

First, we divide the rival firms into two subsamples according to whether their Tobin's q is greater than or less than the announcing firm's q ratio.

The relative importance of competition and contagion in intra-industry information transfers: an investigation of dividend announcements

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