Richardson’s paper is a useful addition to the literature on the relationship between cash flow and investment. His approach to estimating this relationship is a new twist on earlier approaches. Like most of this literature, Richardson finds evidence that firms’ investment decisions are excessively sensitive to current cash flow, suggesting that violations of the Modigliani–Miller assumptions a...

Shareholders have imperfect control over the decisions of the management of a firm. We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of owership and control — Jensen’s (1986) free cash flow theory — into a dynamic equilibrium model and study the effect of imperfect corporate control on asset prices and investment. We assume that firms are run by empire-building managers who prefer to in...

A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents, in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. “Steeper” securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap between the two highest valuations, yet reduce effort incentives. In view of this trade-off, the generalized equity...

Automobile manufacturers make frequent use of promotions that give cash-back payments. Two common types of cash-back promotions are rebates to customers, which are widely publicized to potential customers, and rebates to dealers, which are not publicized. While the payments nominally go entirely to one party or another, the real division of the manufacturer-supplied surplus between dealer and c...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this sensitivity a result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information when managers owning equity are underinvesting if the market (erroneously) demands too high a risk premium? We find tha...