The cash flows of technology-based companies show high degrees of uncertainty. As traditional valuation methods can hardly capture these characteristics, they are insufficient for valuing these kinds of companies. On the contrary, real options theory can quantify the value associated with management flexibility, growth opportunities, and synergies. This chapter assesses the corporate value of a...

In this paper, we model cash flow and consumption growth rates as a vectorautoregression (VAR), from which we measure the response of cash flow growth to consumption shocks. As the appropriate cash flow proxy is not unambiguous, nor likely to be measured without error, we consider three alternatives for portfolio cash flows: cash dividends, dividends plus repurchases and corporate earnings. We ...

This paper presents an overview of information-based asset pricing. In the information-based approach, an asset is defined by its cash-flow structure. The market is assumed to have access to “partial” information about future cash flows. Each cash flow is determined by a collection of independent market factors called X-factors. The market filtration is generated by a set of information process...

Casella for invaluable guidance during my program. I would also like to thank Professors Peter Wilson, Vic Bernard and Tom Stober for their willingness to answer questions and offer advice. Financial support from the Arthur Andersen Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the UW/SSHRC grant program during various stages of this work was greatly appreciated...

This paper studies the propensity of firms to commit to disclose information that is subsequently biased, in the presence of other firms also issuing potentially biased information. An important aspect of such an analysis is the fact that firms can choose whether to disclose or withhold information. We show that allowing the number of disclosed reports to be endogenous introduces a countervaili...

In this paper we study a fundamental issue in the theory of modeling of financial markets. We consider a model where any investment opportunity is described by its cash flows. We allow for a finite number of transactions in a finite time horizon. Each transaction is held at a random moment. This places our model closer to the real world situation than discrete-time or continuous-time models. Mo...