This paper shows that the presence of conditional staging in R&D (Research & Development) has a critical impact on portfolio risk, and changes diversification arguments when a portfolio is constructed. When R&D projects exhibit option-like characteristics, correlation between projects plays a...

We model the financing, cash holdings, and hedging policies of a firm facing financing frictions and subject to permanent and transitory cash flow shocks. We show that permanent and transitory shocks generate distinct, sometimes opposite, effects on corporate policies and use the model to...

We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

While risk management gained popularity during the last decades even some of the basic risk types are still far out of focus. One of these is path dependency that refers to the uncertainty of how we reach a certain level of total performance over time. While decision makers are careful in...

Institutional investors pay considerable attention to the quality of a company's governance. Unfortunately, it is difficult for outside observers to reliably gauge governance quality. Oftentimes, poor governance manifests itself only after decisions have been made and their outcomes known. We...

This paper investigates the extent to which corporate cash holdings protect firms from the adverse consequences of shocks to their borrowing cost. It develops a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions subject to real and financial frictions. The calibrated model matches the...

Regulators dedicate much attention to the option that financial institutions in distress have to transfer losses to their creditors. It is generally recognized that the existence of this option provides intermediaries with a powerful incentive to keep firm capital close to the minimal...

Venture capital (VC) funds are supplied by a wide range of individual and institutional investors with varied risk profile. The funds vary in size and given funds life VC fund managers thus face two tiers of issues with liquidity and risk management. First the fund managers could face a set of...

This teaching note provides step-by-step instruction for simulating the net present value and the internal rate of return of a five-year project. The uncertainty lie in the initial level of sales, sales growth rates, gross profit margins, operating expenses before depreciation, and the terminal...