This paper presents a model tha t measures the impact of political risk on portfolio investment when the political risks are multivariate and correlated across countries. The multivariate approach generalizes the single country model but retains most of its characteristics in terms of its ability to price political risk based on the stochastic process of exposure to loss and the expected freque...

We develop a dynamic incomplete-markets model of entrepreneurial firms, and demonstrate the implications of nondiversifiable risks for entrepreneurs’ interdependent consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. We characterize the optimal capital structure via a generalized tradeoff model where risky debt provides significant diversification benefits. No...

Many economic decisions can be described as an option exercise or optimal stopping problem under uncertainty. Motivated by experimental evidence such as the Ellsberg Paradox, we follow Knight (1921) and distinguish risk from uncertainty. To afford this distinction, we adopt the multiple-priors utility model. We show that the impact of ambiguity on the option exercise decision depends on the rel...

Abstract There is mixed evidence on whether the marginal dollar spent corporate social responsibility due to agency problems. We propose an approach by modeling how 2003 dividend tax cut, which increased after-tax insider ownership and better aligned managerial shareholder interests, affected firm responsibility. confirm key predictions of our model: following moderate insider-ownership firms e...

ABSTRACT We compare seven fraud prediction models with a cost-based measure that nets the benefits of correctly anticipating instances against costs borne by incorrectly flagging non-fraud firms. find even best trade off false to true positives at rates exceeding 100:1. Indeed, high number makes all considered too costly for auditors implement, in subsamples where misreporting is more likely. F...

The regulation of telecommunications, railroads, and other network industries has been based on mandatory unbundling and facilities sharing – entrants have the option to lease part or all of incumbents’ facilities if and when they desire, at rates determined by regulators. This flexibility is of great value to entrants, but because investments are largely irreversible, it is costly to supply by...

We use a Wicksellian single rotation framework to analyze the impact of the intertemporally fluctuating and stochastic mean-reverting interest rate process on the optimal harvesting threshold and thereby the expected length of the rotation period, when forest value is also stochastic following geometric Brownian motion and landowners are risk-averse. We provide an explicit solution for the two-...

We examine the effect of competition on investment decisions in an industry in which each firm has a completely irreversible investment opportunity and the product market has positive externalities for a small market size and negative externalities for a large market size. In the latter case, which corresponds to the traditional competitive industries, firms invest sequentially as market profit...

Both the equity premium puzzle and the credit spread puzzle address the problem of a reasonable size of agents’ risk aversion. The empirical estimation of risk aversion parameters is impeded by the fact that observed prices depend on risk preferences and probability beliefs. The market for German redemption lottery bonds constitutes a clean environment to estimate risk aversion coefficients fro...