This paper empirically examines whether additional future fixed capital and R&D investment expenditures induce firms to accumulate cash reserves while considering the role of market imperfections. Implementing a dynamic framework on a panel of US, UK and German companies, we find that firms make larger additions to cash holdings when they plan additional future R&D rather than fixed capital inv...

We study whether firms spread out debt maturity dates, which we call “granularity of corporate debt.” In our model, firms that are unable to roll over expiring debt need to liquidate assets. If multiple small asset sales are less inefficient than a single large one, it can be optimal to diversify debt rollovers across time. Using a large sample of corporate bond issuers during the 1991–2012 per...

Fernandez (2004b) argues that the present value effect of the tax saving on debt cannot be calculated as simply the present value of the tax shields associated with interest. This contradicts standard results in the literature. It implies that, even though the capital market is complete, value-additivity is violated. As a consequence, adjusted present value formulae of a standard sort cannot be...

Using variations in local real estate prices as exogenous shocks to corporate financing capacity, we investigate the causal effects of financial flexibility on cash policies of US firms. Building on this natural experiment, we find strong evidence that increases in real estate values lead to smaller corporate cash reserves, declines in the marginal value of cash holdings, and lower cash flow se...

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a process that manages all risks in an integrated, holistic fashion by controlling and coordinating offsetting risks across the enterprise. This research investigates whether the adoption of the ERM approach affects firms’ cost of equity capital. We restrict our analysis to the U.S. insurance industry to control for unobservable differences in business models...

Article history: Received 7 January 2010 Accepted 13 August 2010 Available online 21 August 2010 This paper simultaneously analyses optimal dividend, debt and investment policy within a conventional multi-period DCF framework, and takes account of differential personal taxation over both investors and types of income, the effect of dividends and interest on the level of share issues and hence s...

The rationale for using heuristics to establish a risk premium that is added to the risk-free rate to obtain the value of an investment is questioned and an alternative method, termed decoupled net present value (DNPV), is proposed. Rather than using utility theory concepts to decrease the value of uncertain cash flows, the risks associated with project cash flows are discretely quantified usin...

This paper generalizes the Myers and Majluf (1984) model by introducing an agency cost structure based on private benefits of control. This new model predicts that many corporate finance variables each have opposing effects on underand overinvestment. Private benefits exacerbate overinvestment but, interestingly, a small amount of private benefits can enhance firm value by alleviating underinve...

This paper looks at the effect of shareholder horizon on corporate behavior. In perfect capital markets, corporate behavior should be insensitive to shareholder horizon, but when investment opportunities are not well valued by the market, shareholder horizon matters. We first present a simple framework to show that shareholder horizon should be looked at in conjunction with stock misvaluation. ...

We investigate whether foreign institutional ownership impacts corporate innovation. Using firm-level data from 30 countries in 2001-2010, we find that higher foreign institutional ownership is associated with more investment in R&D and patents. Using the exogenous increase in foreign institutional holdings that follows a firm’s addition to the Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index, ...