This series on the theory of financial management offers insight into the roles of stockholder wealth maximization, the risk-return tradeoff, and agency conflicts as they apply to major topics in finance. The current article investigates capital budgeting. Much literature addresses this topic,...

When self-interested agents compete for scarce resources, they often exaggerate the promise of their activities. As such, principals must consider both the quality of each opportunity and each agent's credibility. We show that principals are better off with less transparency because they gain...

Extensive prior research documents significant inefficiencies of corporate capital expenditures. However, a firm's internal investment decision process remains mostly a black box. Using manually collected data, we document significant variations in capital expenditure budget execution....

To understand their financial position, universities need to understand the long-term implications of their operating revenues and costs in relation to the financial assets they have available. Standard budgeting procedures that focus on one or two years at a time and use generally accepted...

The paper presents an adverse selection-based explanation of the fact that some entrepreneurs choose to finance multiple projects together by issuing a single security and other entrepreneurs decide to finance each project separately. We consider the financing problem of an entrepreneur who has...

We contribute to the empirical literature on the relationship between corporate taxes and investment. We exploit the introduction of the so-called ACE corporate tax reform in Belgium that came into effect in January 2006 to evaluate this relationship in a quasiexperimental setting based on...

The survey findings indicate the existence of gap between theory and practice of capital budgeting. Standard appraisal methods have shown a wider project value discrepancy, which is beyond and above the contingency limit. In addition, the research has found the growing trend in the use of value...