Johannes Barg

Doctoral Students

Curriculum Vitae

Johannes Barg ist seit April 2019 Doktorand und wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Corporate Finance und Ship Finance. Zuvor absolvierte er von 2013 bis 2018 sein Bachelor- und Masterstudium der Wirtschaftsmathematik mit den Schwerpunkten Corporate Finance und Stochastik an der Universität Hamburg. In dieser Zeit verbrachte Herr Barg Auslandssemester an der University of Southampton (Vereinigtes Königreich) und an der Lund University (Schweden). Herr Barg arbeitete studienbegleitend als studentische Hilfskraft am Lehrstuhl für Corporate Finance und Ship Finance sowie als Praktikant in der Unternehmensberatung und im Investmentbanking.

Ausgewählte Publikationen

Board ancestral diversity and voluntary greenhouse gas emission disclosure

Johannes Barg, Wolfgang Drobetz, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami, Henning Schröder
HFRC Working Paper Series | Version 01/2022
Prior research suggests that the disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—a primary cause of climate change—affects firm valuation. In this paper, we provide new insights into the determinants of the voluntary disclosure of GHG emissions. We show that board ancestral diversity has a positive and statistically significant effect on a firm’s scope and quality of voluntary GHG emission disclosure. This effect is robust to controlling for several other dimensions of board diversity as well as to addressing endogeneity and sample selection. Additional analysis suggests that board ancestral diversity has a higher impact on GHG emission disclosure in firms with low institutional ownership and high corporate complexity. We interpret these findings as consistent with the view that board diversity enhances monitoring and advising.

Valuing start-up firms: A reverse-engineering approach for fair-value multiples from venture capital transactions

Johannes Barg, Wolfgang Drobetz, Paul P. Momtaz
Finance Research Letters | 03/2021 | Forthcoming
The valuation of start-up firms is challenging, yet highly relevant for entrepreneurs and financiers alike. We reverse-engineer fair-value multiples by comparing the firm value at the time of financing with the firm value at the time of exit. Our framework produces reliable valuation multiples from observed venture capital transactions per industry and financing round. Despite their simplicity, sanity checks confirm that our multiples are highly performant in describing common valuation characteristics. Valuation multiples are higher when more experienced investors are involved, and when the exit occurs through an IPO rather than an M&A. In contrast, later stage financing rounds and larger investment consortia are associated with lower valuation multiples.