We study whether firms spread out debt maturity dates, which we call “granularity of corporate debt.” In our model, firms that are unable to roll over expiring debt need to liquidate assets. If multiple small asset sales are less inefficient than a single large one, it can be optimal to diversify debt rollovers across time. Using a large sample of corporate bond issuers during the 1991–2012 per...

Fernandez (2004b) argues that the present value effect of the tax saving on debt cannot be calculated as simply the present value of the tax shields associated with interest. This contradicts standard results in the literature. It implies that, even though the capital market is complete, value-additivity is violated. As a consequence, adjusted present value formulae of a standard sort cannot be...

Is investment cash-flow sensitivity affected by a country’s capital market imperfection? We take 42 countries as our sample and collect six imperfect capital market measures (ICAM), ie., the stock market capitalization ratio, number of publicly-listed firm, stock turnover ratio, bank loan ratio, long-term debt ratio and the interest spread. Using a two-step approach, negative relationships betw...

Article history: Received 4 July 2009 Received in revised form 26 May 2012 Accepted 3 August 2012 Available online 5 October 2012 Controlling for country-level governance, we investigate how firms' corporate governance influences financing constraints. Using firm-level corporate governance rankings across 14 emerging markets, we find that better corporate governance lowers the dependence of eme...

Using variations in local real estate prices as exogenous shocks to corporate financing capacity, we investigate the causal effects of financial flexibility on cash policies of US firms. Building on this natural experiment, we find strong evidence that increases in real estate values lead to smaller corporate cash reserves, declines in the marginal value of cash holdings, and lower cash flow se...

Real world investment decisions are generally made sequentially over time. The possibility of subsequent decisions like suspending a project must be considered when an initial investment decision is made. This seems to be particularly important in the case of investments, which take a long 'time to build'. This paper analyzes the impact of lags between the initial investment decision and the co...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms’ cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models...

Article history: Received 7 January 2010 Accepted 13 August 2010 Available online 21 August 2010 This paper simultaneously analyses optimal dividend, debt and investment policy within a conventional multi-period DCF framework, and takes account of differential personal taxation over both investors and types of income, the effect of dividends and interest on the level of share issues and hence s...

We consider a labor market search model where, by working longer hours, individuals acquire greater skills and thereby obtain better jobs. We show that job inequality, which leads to within-skill wage differences, gives incentives to work longer hours. By contrast, a higher probability of losing jobs, a longer duration of unemployment, and in general a less tight labor market discourage working...

The rationale for using heuristics to establish a risk premium that is added to the risk-free rate to obtain the value of an investment is questioned and an alternative method, termed decoupled net present value (DNPV), is proposed. Rather than using utility theory concepts to decrease the value of uncertain cash flows, the risks associated with project cash flows are discretely quantified usin...