We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates an option to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model sheds light, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms' dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the...

This paper provides a model of investment timing by managers in a decentralized firm in the presence of agency conflicts and information asymmetries. When investment decisions are delegated to managers, contracts must be designed to provide incentives for managers to both extend effort and...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

Can directed technical change be used to combat climate change? We construct new firm-level panel data on auto industry innovation distinguishing between "dirty" (internal combustion engine) and "clean" (e.g. electric and hybrid) patents across 80 countries over several decades. We show that...

Academics, the media, and policymakers have all raised concerns about the implications of human workers being replaced by machines or software. Few have discussed the implications of the reverse: firms' ability to replace capital with workers. We show that this flexibility can help new firms...

This article develops and implements a Real Option approach to value renewable natural resources in the case of Marine Fisheries. The model includes two sources of uncertainty: the resource biomass and the price of fish, and it can be used by fisheries to optimally adapt their harvesting...

We examine the extent to which uncertainty delays investment and the effect of competition on this relationship using a sample of 1,214 condominium developments in Vancouver, Canada built from 1979-1998. We find that increases in both idiosyncratic and systematic risk lead developers to delay...

The real options framework has been used extensively to analyze the timing of investment under uncertainty. While standard real options models assume that agents possess a constant rate of time preference, there is substantial evidence that agents are very impatient about choices in the...

Sunk costs play a central role in antitrust economics, but are often misunderstood and mismeasured. I will try to clarify some of the conceptual and empirical issues related to sunk costs, and explain their implications for antitrust analysis. I will be particularly concerned with the role of...

In this article we develop a model to analyze patent-protected R&D investment projects when there is (imperfect) competition in the development and marketing of the resulting product. The competitive interactions that occur substantially complicate the solution of the problem since the decision...