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...

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...