We study the implementability of Black's (1988) elegant discounting rule. The rule overcomes thorny problems that traditional valuation approaches struggle with, namely identifying the market portfolio, measuring project risk, and assessing the market risk premium. We offer new theory, showing...

This paper is about shareholder value. We examine whether welfare considerations justify that target and whether competitive markets force firms to pursue it. We also argue that shareholder value is strictly an ill-defined goal. We report evidence from a large sample of listed firms across the...

We ask whether corporations pay out the cash that shareholders anticipate and find consistent evidence. We study the firms traded on the NYSE, the AMEX, and the Nasdaq in 1926 to 2004. Over 30-year investment horizons, corporate cash distributions are commensurate with initial stock prices,...

We rely on a survey of Swiss firms to document deviation from first-best for reasons of internal quot;fairnessquot; when allocating resources. This quot;socialistquot; practice is more widespread in smaller than in larger firms. It ignores the reputation and past performance of the managers who...

This paper examines whether Swiss firms maximize shareholder value. To find out, we survey the goals of 313 listed and unlisted firms. We then examine whether managers' decisions are consistent with their goals and analyze whether performance corresponds to intentions. Our results show that most...

We investigate the pricing discount for limited liquidity. Unlike previous studies that have examined the relation between historical returns and liquidity, ours looks directly at current stock prices. This approach requires less data and yields up-to-date information about limited liquidity...