IPO firms with high-powered CEO incentive contracts have lower failure rates in the aftermarket. Economically, an interquartile change in the distribution of CEO pay translates in a reduction of the failure risk probability by approximately 21%. The Pay Gap between the CEO and its subordinate...

Using an NPV-based revealed-preference strategy, I find that idiosyncratic risk materially affects the discount rate that firms use in their capital budgeting decisions. I exploit quasi-exogenous within-region variation in project-specific idiosyncratic risk and find that, on average, firms...

Firms obtain noisy estimates of investors' required rates of return (discount rates) using market-based information. Discounted-cash-flow (DCF) methods, as commonly taught in MBA courses, lead to upward-biased estimates of project values in the presence of such noise, even when cash flow and...

This paper offers a novel framework, combining firm operational risk, IPO pricing risk, and market risk, to model IPO failure risk. By analyzing nearly a thousand variables, we observe that prior IPO failure risk models have suffered from a major missing-variable problem. Evidence reveals...

This paper builds on Rosen (1981) and Hvide (2002) to provide a simple framework that elucidates the nature of incentives in the tournaments among top executives in both the external managerial labor market for the top executive positions in other companies and within the executives' own firm...

Risk is a vital concept to grasp when investing in a firm or project. It is also a key ingredient required to evaluate the cost of capital and perform a valuation. An organization’s capital structure, specifically the amount of leverage and debt financing employed, must be accounted for to...

Investors have to be offered risk premiums to invest in risky assets. These risk premiums take different forms in different asset markets: equity risk premiums (ERP) in stock markets, default spreads in bond markets and real asset premiums in other asset markets. These premiums have their roots...

We investigate the impact of workers' exposure to unemployment risk on CEO incentive compensation. Exploiting state-level changes in unemployment benefits as a source of variation in workers' unemployment costs, we find that after unemployment insurance benefits become more generous boards...

We examine the effects on IPO uncertainty of an alternative going-public mechanism - the two-stage IPO, where a firm first gets quoted on the OTC market, and then upgrades to a national exchange where it first issues public equity. We find that a two-stage IPO firm experiences lower underpricing...