Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory PDF Author: John R. Minahan
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory and Principal-agent Theory PDF Author: John R. Minahan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Essays in Corporate Finance Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory PDF Author: Dan Luo (Researcher in corporate finance theory)
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation consists of three pieces of research in theoretical corporate finance. The first one studies multi-agent design problems. Agents are concerned about each other's decisions and can communicate strategically with each other. The principal would like to motivate agents' participation decisions by affecting their communication. I employ such a multi-agent perspective on economic design to understand practices such as syndication. The second and the third ones take a more applied approach and study agency problems in specific corporate finance settings. They shed light on information design in corporate governance and dynamic interactions in special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), respectively.

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance Theory PDF Author: Mr. Andrey Malenko
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This thesis consists of three essays that examine various problems in corporate finance. The central theme of all essays is information asymmetry between agents. The first essay features information asymmetry between the headquarters and the division manager about investment projects of the division and studies the best way to provide the manager with incentives to invest efficiently. The second essay studies implications of asymmetric information between the decision-maker and the outsiders on exercise decisions of real options in several settings. The third essay features asymmetric information between sellers of assets and potential buyers and studies what selling procedures arise in equilibrium in a market with multiple sellers and potential buyers. More specifically, in Chapter 1 of the dissertation, I study optimal design of a capital allocation system in a firm in which the division manager with empire-building preferences privately observes the arrival and properties of investment projects, and the headquarters is able to audit each project at a cost. I show that under certain conditions the optimal system takes the form of a budgeting mechanism with threshold division of authority. Specifically, the headquarters: (i) allocates a spending account to the manager at the initial date and accumulates it over time; (ii) sets a threshold on the size of individual projects, such that all projects below the threshold are delegated to the manager and financed out of her spending account, while all projects above the threshold are audited and financed fully by the headquarters. I extend the model in several directions, including multiple audit technologies, multiple project categories, and the possibility of renegotiation. In Chapter 2, which is the product of joint work with Steven R. Grenadier, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we study games in which the decision to exercise an option is a signal of private information to outsiders, whose beliefs affect the utility of the decision-maker. In a general setting that accommodates a variety of applications we show that signaling incentives distort the timing of exercise, and the direction of distortion depends on whether the decision-maker's utility increases or decreases in the outsiders' belief about the payoff from exercise. In the former case, signaling incentives erode the value of the option to wait and speed up option exercise, while in the latter case option exercise is delayed. We demonstrate the implications of the general model through four corporate finance applications: investment under managerial myopia, venture capital grandstanding, investment under cash flow diversion, and product market competition. In Chapter 3, which is the product of joint work with\ Alexander S.\ Gorbenko, forthcoming in the American\ Economic Review, we study simultaneous security-bid second-price auctions with competition among sellers for potential bidders. The key difference from the prior literature on competition among auctioneers is that we allow bidders to make bids in the form of contingent claims on future payoffs of the assets. The sellers compete for bidders by designing ordered sets of securities that the bidders can offer as payment for the assets. Upon observing auction designs, potential bidders decide which auctions to enter. We characterize all symmetric equilibria and show that there always exist equilibria in which auctions are in standard securities or their combinations. In large markets the unique equilibrium is auctions in pure cash. We extend the model for competition in reserve prices and show that binding reserve prices never constitute equilibrium as long as equilibrium security designs are not call options.

Three Essays in Empirical Corporate Finance

Three Essays in Empirical Corporate Finance PDF Author: Shage Zhang
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ISBN:
Category : Chief executive officers
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing

Essays on Corporate Finance Theory and Behavioral Asset Pricing PDF Author: Jieying Hong
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis consists of three self-contained papers. The first two papers study how firms should be structured to facilitate their access to funds in the face of agency conflicts between borrowers (firms) and lenders (investors). Chapter 1 studies the relationship between firm scope and financial constraints. Chapter 2 uses an optimal contracting approach to analyze the development of an innovative product through strategic alliance by an entrepreneur and an incumbent. Chapter 3 analyzes whether traders' experience reduce their propensity to speculate?

Three Essays in Corporate Finance

Three Essays in Corporate Finance PDF Author: Jérôme Philippe Alain Taillard
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ISBN:
Category : Corporations
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Abstract: In my dissertation, I first contribute to the capital structure literature by estimating the potential impact of financial distress on a firm's real business operations. Secondly, I contribute to the ownership structure literature, and more broadly to the field of corporate governance, by revisiting the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance. In my first essay, I analyze a comprehensive sample of defendant firms that found themselves exposed to an unexpected wave of asbestos litigation in the wake of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Since these legal liabilities are unrelated to current operations, firms that are in financial distress due to their legal woes provide a natural experiment to study the impact of financial distress on a firm's operational performance. When analyzing firms suffering from this exogenous shock to their finances, I find little evidence of negative spillover effects ("indirect" costs) of financial distress. That is, the competitive position of the distressed firms is not adversely impacted by their weakened financial situation. Furthermore, I find empirical support for a significant disciplinary effect of financial distress as these firms actively restructure and refocus on core operations. In my second and third essays, I focus on the relationship between managerial ownership and firm performance using a large panel dataset of U.S. firms over the period 1988-2004. In the second essay, I reconcile some of the extant literature by showing that the relationship is sensitive to the firm size characteristics of the sample being used. In particular, I recover the classic hump-shaped relationship when focusing only on the largest firms (e.g. Fortune 500 firms), while the relationship turns negative when the sample is comprised of smaller firms. The negative relationship among smaller firms is consistent with entrenchment arguments given that managerial ownership is on average much higher for small firms. Second, I find that for lower levels of managerial ownership, the negative relationship is driven by older firms that have on average less liquid stocks. This finding is consistent with firms that do not perform well enough to create a liquid market for their stock, and hence have to keep high levels of insider ownership in order to avoid a negative price impact that would result from a reduction of their stake. Lastly, these results could also be suggestive of endogeneity concerns. I investigate this issue further in my third essay. Principal-agent models predict that managerial ownership and firm performance are endogenously determined by exogenous changes in a firm's contracting environment. Changes in the contracting environment are, however, only partially observed, and the standard statistical techniques used to address endogeneity may be ineffective in this corporate setting. In my third essay, together with my coauthor Phil Davies, we develop a novel econometric approach to control for the influence of time-varying unobserved variables related to a firm's contracting environment. Using the same large panel dataset of U.S. firms over the period 1988-2004, we find no evidence of a systematic relation between managerial ownership and performance.

Financial Management and the Agency Theory

Financial Management and the Agency Theory PDF Author: Simon Bergstein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783656614920
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: A15 bzw. 1,0, University of New South Wales, Sydney, language: English, abstract: In Financial Management its generally assumed that the goal of a private firm is shareholder wealth maximization respectively maximizing shareholder value (ACCA BPP, 2012, p. 5). This assumption correspond with a recent statement of Philip Clarke (2013) - Chief Executive Officer of Tesco who declared that '[e]verything [they] are doing reflects [their] determination to deliver shareholder value'. The question arises if shareholder wealth maximization is an appropriate goal since there are other individuals besides the shareholders that are affected by the activities of a firm. Another point is that managers often do not act in shareholders best interest in order to maximize their own utility. This conflict of interest is described by the agency theory. Furthermore the agency relationship complicates the achievement of the goal of shareholder wealth maximization (Van Horne and Wachowicz, 2009, p.5). Recently shareholders of the former Yellow Pages publisher Hibu blame the management not to act in their best interest because of both a lack of information provided by directors and by restructuring the company with a debt-for-equity swap that wipes shareholders out. As a consequence of Hibu's oppressive debt mountain the debt-for-equity swap enables major lenders to take control over the company (Spanier, 2013). In this context the concept of cost of capital and its calculation provides an approach to the costs of financing decision. (McLaney, 2011, p.296). Since the debt-for-equity swap restructures Hibus balance sheet it is of crucial importance to examine the sources of capital that are discussed in this context in order to evaluate the reasonableness of the debt-for-equity swap from a economical perspective. Section 1 of this assignment focuses on the characteristics of shareholders' wealth max

Essays in Corporate Finance and Contract Theory

Essays in Corporate Finance and Contract Theory PDF Author: Jacob Gyntelberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 78

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Essays in Corporate Finance and Investment

Essays in Corporate Finance and Investment PDF Author: Lin William Cong
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This thesis consists of two essays that examine several problems in corporate finance and mechanism design. The central theme is endogenous agency conflicts and their impact on dynamic investment decisions. The first essay features auctions of assets and projects with embedded real options, and subsequent exercises of these investment options. The essay shows timing and security choice of auctions endogenously misalign incentives among agents and derives the optimal auction design and exercise strategy. The second essay studies implications of endogenous learning on irreversible investment decisions, in particular, how learning gives rise to asymmetric information between managers and shareholders in decentralized firms. Depending on the quality of the project, the optimal contract between principal and agent distorts investments in ways that has not been examined in the literature. Specifically, in Chapter 1 of the dissertation, I study how governments and corporations auction real investment options using both cash and contingent bids. Examples include sales of natural resource leases, real estate, patents and licenses, and start-up firms with growth options. I incorporate both endogenous auction initiation and post-auction option exercise into the traditional auctions framework, and show that common security bids create moral hazard because the winning bidder's real option differs from the seller's. Consequently, investment could be either accelerated or delayed depending on the security design. Strategic auction timing affects auction initiation, security ranking, equilibrium bidding, and investment; it should be considered jointly with security design and the seller's commitment level. Optimal auction design aligns investment incentives using a combination of down payment and royalty payment, but inefficiently delays sale and investment. I also characterize informal negotiations as timing and signaling games in which bidders can initiate an auction and determine the forms of bids. I show that post-auction investments are efficient and bidding equilibria are equivalent to those of cash auctions. However, in this setting, bidders always initiate the informal auctions inefficiently early. In addition, I provide suggestive evidence for model predictions using data from the leasing and exploration of oil and gas tracts, which leads to several ongoing empirical studies. Altogether, these results reconcile theory with several empirical puzzles and imply novel predictions with policy relevance. In Chapter 2, I examine learning as an important source of managerial flexibility and how it naturally induces information asymmetry in decentralized firms. Timing of learning is crucial for investment decisions, and optimal strategies involve sequential thresholds for learning and investing. Incentive contracts are needed for learning and truthful reporting. The inherent agency conflicts alter investment behavior significantly, and are costly to investors and welfare. But contracting on learning restores efficiency with low future uncertainty or sufficient liquidity. Unlike prior studies, the moral hazard of learning accelerates good projects and delays bad projects. Even the best type's investment is distorted, and only when learning is contractible can adverse selection dominate learning.

Essays on Finance and Agency Theory

Essays on Finance and Agency Theory PDF Author: Vladislav Karguine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Finance
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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