The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) was designed to spur the development of drugs for rare diseases. In principle, its design also incentivizes pharmaceutical firms to develop drugs for "rare" subdivisions of more prevalent diseases. I find that in response to this incentive, firms develop drugs for ODA-qualifying subdivisions of non-rare diseases. The impact in these tailored drug markets represents hal...

We investigate relations between inside ownership, managerial expenses and equity valuations. Our engine of analysis —Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) —provides a unique and rich framework for analysis since we can calculate extremely accurate measures of asset replacement costs, and hence relative valuation (Tobin's Q). Further, the nature of the financial statements allows us to examine ...

This paper analyzes the impact of bureaucratic decision costs on agency expertise. The analysis shows that the effect of the cost associated with adopting a new regulation (the “enactment cost”) on agency expertise depends on what the agency would do if it remains uninformed. If an uninformed agency would regulate, increasing enactment costs increases agency expertise; if an uninformed agency w...

Pacific Economic Bulletin Volume 21 Number 2 2006 © Asia Pacific Press The Fiji Sugar Corporation, the sole miller in Fiji, has experienced declining financial performance for over a decade, despite Fiji enjoying sugar prices two to three times the average world price. The corporation’s poor financial performance has primarily been blamed on the increase in burnt cane. This paper tests the impo...

This paper proposes a unified theoretical framework to discuss the costs and benefits of privatization using the recent advances of Incentive Theory. I begin by presenting a simple model in which the State (the principal) delegates a task (e.g., the production of a public good) to the private sector (the agent). I give and discuss conditions for the “Irrelevance Theorem” due to Sappington and S...

This paper investigates the effect of managerial flexibility on the choice of capital structure for a firm and the corresponding valuation of its long term debt. We consider a general model in continuous time where the manager (who is not a shareholder) of a firm with long term debt in place may dynamically switch strategies at random times so as to maximize his expected discounted compensation...

1.0 INTRODUCTION In the past few decades, U.S. businesses have made large investments in information technology (IT), without decisive evidence about the value of such investments [1]. A natural question that arises in this context is whether managers have wasted organizational resources through large investments in IT. In his well-known free cash flow hypothesis, Michael Jensen argues that man...