We explore a long standing prediction in the international business literature that managers' subjective perceptions of political risk – not just the level of risk – are important for how firms manage political risk. The importance attributed to political risk by corporate executives has...

Using a news-based index of aggregate policy uncertainty in the US economy, we document a strong negative relation between policy uncertainty and corporate risk-taking. We show that high levels of policy uncertainty are associated with significantly lower future stock return volatility at the...

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...

Central banks and supervisory authorities regularly conduct stress tests of banks. As losses accumulate in stress scenarios, banks' equity position worsens, and they must pay higher interest rates to retain funding. I explore how variations of Merton-type models can be used to measure bank risk,...

We develop a dynamic model of investment, capital structure, leasing, and risk management based on firms' need to collateralize promises to pay with tangible assets. Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay subject to collateral constraints. Leasing is strongly collateralized...

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...

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...

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...

We consider a dynamic model of investment in which a firm can hold inventory to mitigate the price risk of an input commodity. Our model predicts that inventory allows to hedge against net worth risk by smoothing investment in capital, irrespective of the level of current net worth. Savings...

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...