Despite the mixed evidence, recent empirical works highlight importance of idiosyncratic risk in stock market. On this basis, note elaborates an approach to price directly specific cost capital, both for scientific purposes and practitioner’s investment valuation. For extremely high leverage values, risky debt tends approximate unlevered capital. Exploiting a Merton model, we show simple soluti...

Investment is often irreversible: once installed, capital has little or no value unless used in production. This paper proposes, solves and characterizes a model of sequential irreversible investment by a firm facing uncertainty in technology, demand and price of capital. The solution can be found in closed form if simple (but not totally unrealistic) functional forms are assumed, and can be gi...

The opportunity cost of the capital invested in pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) to bring a new drug to market makes up as much as half the total cost. However, the literature on the cost of pharmaceutical R&D is mixed on how, exactly, one should calculate this "hidden" cost. Some authors attempt to adopt models from the field of finance, whereas other prominent authors dismiss thi...

In the first essay (joint work with Bryan Routledge), we calculate the value implications of suboptimal capital budgeting decisions in an asset-pricing model calibrated to match the standard asset pricing empirical properties – in particular, the time-variation in the equity premium. Specifically, we calculate that an investment policy that ignores the time variation in the equity premium, such...

We study the behavior of real exchange rates in a two-country dynamic equilibrium model. In this model, consumers can only consume domestic goods but can invest costlessly in capital stocks of both countries. Nevertheless, transporting goods between the two countries is costly and, hence, the rebalancing of the capital stock can only happen finitely often. We propose a realistic cost structure ...