In this paper the author proves that the Expected Net Future Value (ENFV) criterion can lead a risk neutral social planner to reject projects that increase expected utility. By contrast, the Expected Net Present Value (ENPV) rule correctly identifies the economic value of the project. While the ENFV increases with uncertainty over future interest rates, the expected utility decreases because of...

A multi-divisional firm can engage in ”winner-picking” to redistribute scarce funds efficiently across divisions. But there is a conflict between rewarding winners (investing) and producing resources with which to reward winners (incentives). Managers in winning divisions are tempted to free-ride on resources produced by managers in loosing divisions whose incentives to produce resources, antic...

We examine investment behavior when firms face costs in the access to external funds. We find that despite the existence of liquidity constraints, standard investment regressions predict that cash flow is an important determinant of investment only if one ignores q. Conversely, we also obtain significant cash flow effects even in the absence of financial frictions. These findings provide suppor...

This paper provides a method for estimating the market risk premium that accounts for shifts in investment opportunities by explicitly modeling the underlying process governing the level of market volatility. I find that approximately 50% of the measured risk premium is related to the risk of future changes in investment opportunities. Evidence of a structural shift in the underlying volatility...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building. We test this result with a laboratory experiment. We find that, when the problem of product market opportunism is moderate, i.e., reputation formation equilibri...

This paper provides evidence that a firm’s stock price movements affect its customer demand. I develop a model in which customers learn about a firm’s product quality partially from its stock price. This learning induces feedback from the price to customer demand. Furthermore, the firm manager adjusts product launch decisions in anticipation of these demand shifts. Consistent with the model’s i...

The paper explores factors that lead to accumulation or decumulation of firms’ cash reserves. In particular, we empirically examine whether additional future fixed capital and R&D investment expenditures induce firms to change their liquidity ratio while considering the role of market imperfections. Implementing a dynamic framework on a panel of US, UK and German firms, we find that firms in al...

This paper empirically examines the role of diversification in export markets on firm-level R&D activities taking account of the potential endogeneity in this relationship. We show that geographical sales diversification across different regions of the world induces UK firms to increase their R&D expenditures, as firms must innovate and develop new products to maintain a competitive edge over t...

We analyze how the financial conditions of the firm affect the compensation structure of workers, the size of the firm, and its dynamics. Firms that are financially constrained offer long-term wage contracts characterized by an increasing wage profile, that is, they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher future wages, effectively borrowing from their employees. Because constrained firms al...

This paper investigates the decision of an automaker concerning the alternative promotion of a hybrid vehicle (HV) and a full electric vehicle (EV). We evaluate the HV project by considering the option to change promotion from the HV to the EV in the future. The results not only extend previous findings concerning American options on multiple assets, but also include several new implications. O...