Evaluating the benefits of investment projects related to climate change is complicated by the disagreements surrounding key model inputs, especially the discount rate. It is widely believed that disagreement about the discount rate requires relaxing the threshold needed to justify investment,...

The new public management of the 1980s was based in part on a range of important new insights about the role of transaction and agency costs arising from contractual incompleteness in defining the boundaries of the firm and the governance relationships within it. In this paper, we consider the...

This paper presents a tractable model of a firm that chooses both the scale and timing of its investment. The value-maximizing investment policy is lumpy, and sensitivity analysis shows that greater demand volatility is associated with the firm choosing to invest in larger increments, less...

This paper shows how scale economies affect welfare-maximizing regulation and regulated firms' investment behavior. Price-regulated firms take less advantage of scale economies than social planners, with greater investment distortions for greater economies of scale. Price caps should be below...

This paper shows how the cash flows received by an unregulated firm operating in a workably competitive market can be replicated for a regulated firm. The only change to standard regulatory practice is that each time the regulated firm invests, the amount added to its rate base is the product of...

The existing real options literature explains the value premium as a consequence of either operating leverage raising risk in low-demand states or industry-wide investment lowering risk in high-demand states. This paper presents a simple model in which a value premium arises solely from capacity...

This paper surveys the theoretical literature investigating the effect of firms' investment flexibility on the cross-section of expected stock returns. Real options analysis derives firms' value-maximizing investment policies as functions of exogenous fundamental drivers of profitability and...

This paper uses an example involving a commercial real estate project to demonstrate the practical application of real options analysis. The approach described can be used to value the project at any stage of construction, which is especially useful when market conditions are poor and suspension...

We show how CEO ownership and the market for corporate control interact to influence the investment-timing decisions of empire-building CEOs. The prospect of a future takeover means that CEOs with no ownership stake will over-invest in some types of projects and under-invest in others, but these...

This paper presents a parsimonious model of a coastal locality's adaptation to rising sea levels and uses the model to examine cost-minimizing policies involving two complementary approaches. One involves irreversible investment in sea walls and similar infrastructure. The other involves...