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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...