Managers make decisions on behalf of shareholders. In this context, financial economists have promoted executive stock options as a means to realign the incentives of managers with those of shareholders. We argue that overconfidence and optimism, which are likely to characterize managers, provide an alternative solution to this agency problem. Whereas risk-averse rational managers tend to postp...

The article shows that two measures of the amount of private information in stock price—price nonsynchronicity and probability of informed trading (PIN)—have a strong positive effect on the sensitivity of corporate investment to stock price. Moreover, the effect is robust to the inclusion of controls for managerial information and for other information-related variables. The results suggest tha...

This paper develops a continuous time real options model to study the interaction between industry structure and takeover activity. In an asymmetric industry equilibrium, firms have an endogenous incentive to merge when restructuring decisions are motivated by operating and strategic benefits. The model predicts that (i) the likelihood of restructuring activities are greater in more concentrate...

This paper generalizes the Myers and Majluf (1984) model by introducing an agency cost structure based on private benefits of control. This new model predicts that many corporate finance variables each have opposing effects on underand overinvestment. Private benefits exacerbate overinvestment but, interestingly, a small amount of private benefits can enhance firm value by alleviating underinve...

Moody's endorses the Basel Committee's proposal to use banks' internal risk assessments to re®ne the Basel Accord's risk weights on bank assets and commitments. External risk assessments, such as Moody's credit ratings, will likely play a supporting role as direct inputs into banks' internal rating systems and as tools for benchmarking and validating those systems. However, the widespread use o...

This paper looks at the effect of shareholder horizon on corporate behavior. In perfect capital markets, corporate behavior should be insensitive to shareholder horizon, but when investment opportunities are not well valued by the market, shareholder horizon matters. We first present a simple framework to show that shareholder horizon should be looked at in conjunction with stock misvaluation. ...

In this paper we examine an optimal investment policy of the firm that is financed by issuing equity and debt. Recently, a number of researchers have studied the interaction among firm’s investment and financing decisions under uncertainty by means of real option framework. In the literature, investment problems for a firm with growth options, that is financed with equity and debt are investiga...

This paper compares the efficiency of flat and tall hierarchies from the perspective of ‘socialism in internal capital markets’ (SICM) — a recently documented problem of multi-segment firms in which high-profit segments tend to be underinvested and low-profit segments tend to be overinvested. SICM is characterized with the possibility of divisionalization — grouping elementary business segments...

Using firm age as a proxy for the learning process within a firm, we show that the investments of young firms react more aggressively to profit realizations than the investments of mature firms. With time, firms learn about their long-term quality and their investment decisions become less influenced by the random shocks they receive. We also show that the learning process depends on the volati...

This article considers the value of information and optimal timing to acquire it in a model of irreversible investment. There are two types of uncertainties: first, the value of the investment project depends on an observable stochastic process, and second, it depends on an ex-ante uncertain parameter, whose true value may be learnt at a cost. The former type of uncertainty implies that the opp...