Hierarchy can function as an instrument to channel influence activities or power struggles in organizations. Contrary to what has frequently been argued, we show that multi-divisional organizations may involve lower influence costs than single-tier organizations, even though they offer more scope for organizational conflict and have more executives that can be influenced. These benefits derive ...

We examine exogenous changes in state corporate income taxes over the 1988-2006 period and find that tax decreases significantly boost both the quantity, measured by the number of patents, and the quality, measured by citations per patent, of innovative output, while tax increases have little impact on innovation. Most of the impact of tax changes on innovation occurs two or more years after th...

This paper provides a different perspective on the firm-level empirical analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and capital demand adjustment in host countries. The author estimates a dynamic structural model of investment on a sample of 4672 Belgian firms observed between 2003 and 2010 that permits to distinguish the ‘ownership status’ of firms. He considers a dynamic discrete choic...

We assess the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 on corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework, where a dummy for the passage of the Act is allowed to affect the rate at which managers discount future investment payoffs. Using generalized method of moments estimators, we find that the rate U.S. firm managers apply to discount investment projects rises significantly aft...

Purchases and sales of operating assets by firms generated $162 billion for shareholders over the past 20 years. This contrasts sharply with the evidence on mergers. This paper characterizes the behavior of value-maximizing firms, which could grow organically, purchase existing assets, or sell assets. The approach yields an endogenous selection model that links asset purchases and sales to fund...

The recent interest in the valuation of tax benefits from debt arises from the disagreement in the existing literature about the meaning of “value of tax shields.” Although it is accepted that the value of a firm increases as effect of the tax deductibility of interest, the correct valuation of this extra-value is controversial. In this paper we adopt a risk-neutral approach to derive a general...

This paper presents a recombining trinomial tree for valuing real options with changing volatility. The trinomial tree presented in this paper is constructed by simultaneously choosing such a parameterization that sets a judicious state space while having sensible transition probabilities between the nodes. The volatility changes are modeled with the changing transition probabilities while the ...

This paper develops an empirical approach using econometric techniques for panel data which aims to contribute to the reduction/elimination of the deviation between the book and market value of firms. Based on 20 of the firms with the largest number of patents granted between 1996 and 2006, the results show that: (i) the increase in the return on equity following from an increase in the share o...

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...