A widely cited survey of financial executives reported that more than 50% of the surveyed companies used a single, company-wide discount rate to evaluate all investment proposals. The shortcomings of this approach are well known and reported in virtually every introductory finance text. Yet...

This paper investigates the relation between a firm's location and its corporate finance decisions. We develop a simple model where being located within an industry cluster increases opportunities to make acquisitions, and to facilitate those acquisitions, firms within clusters maintain more...

We provide a simple argument that suggests that better informed hedge funds choose to have less exposure to factor risk. Consistent with this argument we find that hedge funds that exhibit lower R-squares with respect to systematic factors have higher Sharpe ratios, higher information ratios,...

This paper examines information and incentive problems that can exist in the market for conduit mortgages, which are commercial mortgages placed in pools that are repackaged and sold as CMBS. We find that conduit mortgages that are originated by institutions with negative stock price performance...

James Kingsley, a financial analyst for Progressive Exploration and Development Company, has been asked to join a team that will analyze the possible acquisition of a sizable oil field in southeastern Oklahoma. To prepare for the task Mr. Kingsley constructs a spreadsheet model of the economic...