Using Japanese firm data, this paper examines the relationship between firm value and financing decision factors within a free cash flow (FCF) framework. The findings are broadly consistent with the positive tax benefits hypothesis. We find that in firms leverage is positively related to firm value and dividends are negatively related to firm value during the sample period, 1985 to 1996. The re...

Diversified firms can trade at a discount to a matched portfolio of single-segment firms either because diversified firms have lower expected cash flows or because they have higher expected returns. We analyze whether diversification-discount firms have higher expected returns in order to compensate investors for offering less upside potential (or skewness exposure) than focused firms. Our empi...

The main purpose of this study is to examine the incremental information content of operating cash flows in predicting financial distress and thus develop reliable failure prediction models for UK public industrial firms. Neural networks and logit methodology were employed to a dataset of fifty-one matched pairs of failed and non-failed UK public industrial firms over the period 1988–97. The fi...

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 ...

We consider a principal-agent model, in which the agent needs to borrow from the principal to finance a project. Our model is based on DeMarzo and Fishman (2003), except that the agent’s cash flows are given by a Brownian motion with drift in continuous time. The difficulty in writing an appropriate financial contract in this setting lies in the fact that the agent can hide cash flows and not p...

I examine whether earnings that are smoother or more volatile than cash flows provide or garble information. Consistent with theories that predict more informed trading when public information is less informative, I find that bid-ask spreads and the probability of informed trading are higher both when earnings are smoother than cash flows and also when earnings are more volatile than cash flows...

The benefit/cost (B/C) ratio method is utilized in many government and public work projects to determine if the expected benefits provide an acceptable return on the estimated investment and costs. Many authors have studied probabilistic cash flows in recent years. They introduced some analytical methods which determine the probability distribution function of the net present value and internal...

Risk analysis involves the development of the probability distribution for the measure of effectiveness. The risk associated with an investment alternative is generally either given as the possibility of an unfavorable value of the measure of effectiveness or measured by the variance of the measure of effectiveness. In an uncertain economic decision environment, an expert’s knowledge about disc...