This article investigates how the job histories of CEOs influence their capital allocation decisions when they preside over multidivisional firms. I find that, after CEO turnover, divisions not previously affiliated with the new CEO receive significantly more capital expenditures than divisions through which the new CEO has advanced. The pattern of reverse-favoritism in capital allocation is mo...

This paper examines the effect of economic policy uncertainty and its components on firm-level investment. It is found that economic policy uncertainty in interaction with firm-level uncertainty depresses firms’ investment decisions. When firms are in doubt about costs of doing business due to possible changes in regulation, cost of health care and taxes, they become more guarded with investmen...

While most research on hedging has focused on foreign currency exposures, analysis of jet fuel price exposure in the airline industry and the effects of both financial and operational hedging on this exposure provides valuable insights into risk management. Exposure and hedging in the airline industry is relatively straightforward compared to foreign exchange hedging by multinationals. We inves...

In the first part of this paper we address the non-coherence of value-at-risk (VaR) as a risk measure in the context of portfolio credit risk, and highlight some problems which follow from this theoretical deficiency. In particular, a realistic demonstration of the non-subadditivity of VaR is given and the possibly nonsensical consequences of VaR-based portfolio optimisation are shown. The seco...

Project-financing and public-private partnership schemes are joint projects of investment that are generally submitted to investment valuation criteria based on compound discounting. However, the theoretical basis of these criteria is at issue nowadays. According to recent studies on relational contracting economics and behavioral finance, joint projects of investment can be considered as speci...

This paper addresses the hotly-debated question: do Chinese firms overinvest? A firm-level dataset of 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 is employed for this purpose. We initially calculate measures of investment efficiency, which is typically negatively associated with overinvestment. Despite wide disparities across various ownership groups, industries and regions, we find that corporate...

This paper studies the behavior of leverage ratios in a dynamic trade-off model with real frictions. Firms underutilize debt when financing investment to retain financial flexibility. Underutilization of debt persists even when firms exercise their last investment options, and it is more (less) severe for more back-loaded (front-loaded) investment opportunities. Thus, leverage dynamics cruciall...

While much accounting information is idiosyncratic in nature, economy-wide factors such as accounting standards affect the quality of idiosyncratic accounting information of many firms simultaneously. We study these two features of accounting information by embedding a parsimonious, moral hazard problem into the framework of a multi-firm economy in which project choices are endogenous to accoun...

A dividend imputation tax system provides shareholders with a tax credit that can be used to offset personal tax on dividend income. The size of this credit depends on tax paid at the corporate level so that the “double taxation” of dividends is effectively eliminated. This paper shows how to infer the value of imputation tax credits (which is an important input into the weighted-average cost o...