Corporations in many countries are run by controlling shareholders whose cash flow rights in the firm are substantially smaller than their control rights. This separation of ownership and control allows the controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits at the cost of minority investors by...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

The notion of Net Present Value (NPV) is thought to formally translate the notion of economic profit, where the discount rate is the cost of capital. The latter is the expected rate of return of an equivalent-risk alternative that the investor might undertake and is often found by making...

We study the implications of credit market frictions for the dynamics of corporate capital structure and the risk of default of corporations. To do so, we develop a dynamic capital structure model in which firms face uncertainty regarding their ability to raise funds in credit markets and have...

Mutual funds industry has been sought by French politicians as mediation between the popular savings and company’s investments through the financial markets. Questioning the link between finance and industry requires analyzing the effectiveness of this mediation. This article intends firstly...

Evaluating an industrial opportunity often means to engage in financial modelling which results in estimation of a large amount of economic and accounting data, which are then gathered in an economically rational framework: the pro forma financial statements. While the standard net present value...

The value of debt tax shields in foundational corporate valuation models by Nobel Laureates Modigliani and Miller (MM) continues to be a controversial issue that is central to our understanding of corporate finance. This paper argues that a fundamental valuation problem exists in the MM tax...

In this paper we discuss the required return on equity for a simple project with a finite life. To determine a project’s cost of equity, it is quite common to use Modigliani and Miller’s Proposition II (1963). However, if the assumptions of MM do not hold, Proposition II will lead to wrong...

The structure of a firm-commitment Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) resembles a put-option underwritten by an investment bank syndicate (Smith, 1977). Employing implied volatilities from issuers’ stock options as a direct forward-looking measure, this paper examines the impact of expected price...

Given that prior research into industry cost of equity indicates that CAPM-derived estimates are no worse than estimates from more complex models, we investigate the bias of the standard CAPM approach for each industry separately, and examine the effectiveness of alternative beta estimators. We...