Investment-based asset pricing research highlights the role of irreversibility as a determinant of firms' risk and expected return. In a neoclassical model of a firm with costly scale adjustment options, we show that the effect of scale flexibility (i.e., contraction and expansion options) is to...

We examine the asset pricing implications of a neoclassical model of repeated investment and disinvestment. Prior research has emphasized a negative relation between productivity and equity risk that results from operating leverage when capital adjustment is costly. In general, however,...

The properties of information, including "information uncertainty", can be understood only Bayesianly. Common formulations that define information uncertainty in terms of just statistical "precision" (i.e. sampling variance), or any one estimator characteristic (e.g. bias), are inadequate for...

Especially with the evaluation of non-listed (medium-sized) companies, the following problems and significant restrictions pertaining to the applicability of the CAPM must be taken into account when determining cost of capital. 1. Homogeneity of expectations and planning consistency. Given the...

There is tension underlying whether asset redeployability, which refers to the salability of corporate capital assets, shapes crash risk. On one hand, asset redeployability enables managers to opportunistically exploit asset sales to manage earnings upwards to hoard bad news, which, in turn,...

The investment CAPM, in which expected returns vary cross-sectionally with investment, profitability, and expected growth, provides an equilibrium foundation for Graham and Dodd (1934). The q5 model is a good start to explaining prominent security analysis strategies, such as Abarbanell and...

While discussing risk issues someone told me as a joke that she wished the world were riskless and the fact that risk were present in any instance in our lives was a rather unfortunate circumstance. But would we be really better off in a riskless world?Although it may appear to be a trivial...

The real options tradition originally predicted a decreasing relationship between uncertainty and investment, through the positive effect of higher uncertainty on the trigger level for revenue relative to costs. An opposing effect on the probability of reaching the level has been identified,...

Many economic variables of interest exhibit a tendency to revert to predictable long-run levels. However, mean reverting processes are rarely used in investment models in the literature. In most models, geometric Brownian motion processes are used for tractability. In this paper, a firm's entry...

We derive the optimal corporate pension portfolio policy in a consolidated setting in the presence of PBGC insurance. The paper's result formalizes the forces of risk shifting and risk management that shape the form of the corporate pension portfolio. As in Rauh (2009), the risk-shifting and...