Private information imposes a severe trading disadvantage on uninformed traders while at the same time providing firms with valuable signals for investment adjustment. The two forces have opposite impacts on the cost of capital, and the net effect depends on which force dominates. We show that...

I examine whether the time-varying cost of capital is considered in firms' capital budgeting decisions. For this test, I measure the conditional cost of equity, using individual equity option prices. I find that corporate investment responds negatively to fluctuations in the option-implied cost...

We argue that the CAPM may be a reasonable model for estimating the cost of capital for projects in spite of increasing empirical evidence in the literature against the CAPM based on stock returns. As McDonald and Siegel (1985) and Berk, Green and Naik (1999) point out, stocks are backed by...

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...

We present evidence that referenda have a significant, detrimental outcome on investment. Employing an unsupervised machine learning algorithm over the period 2008-2017, we construct three important uncertainty indices underlying reports in the Scottish news media: Scottish independence...

We consider a Markov switching regime and price a discount bond using two popular models for the short rate, the Vasicek- and CIR-dynamics. In both cases, an explicit formula is obtained for the bond price which includes the solution of a matrix ODE. Our model is easy to calculate and captures...

We examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty on the relation between investment and the cost of capital. Using the news-based index developed by Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) for twenty-one countries, we find that the strength of the negative relation between investment and the cost of...

In this paper, we use an exogenous variation in tax regulations to analyze the impact of bonus depreciation programs on business investment. To promote economic convergence of Eastern and Western Germany after reunification, bonus depreciation tax incentives were granted for investments in...

This paper analyzes whether the financial distress of a firm affects the investment decisions of non-distressed competitors. On average, firms in distress impose indirect costs to non-distressed competitors by increasing costs of credit in the industry and hence restricting credit access and...

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor...